Re-purpose Last Year's MO Winery Passport

As you may know, the Missouri Grape & Wine Board introduced a new passport at the beginning of 2013 (find more information about that here). They asked us to throw out any of the old passport journals we had leftover from the previous year.

In my head I literally whined 'but I have a half a box left - that's so wasteful!' This type of thinking is why my storage room is filled with junk, I'm afraid. In any case, for the last few days of national craft month, I felt is was appropriate to do something with these leftover passport journals.

I love checking out all the mixed media art on craft blogs and pinterest, but I've never really messed with doing anything with it. So I figured these would be the perfect practice journals for new-to-me techniques.

Mixed media is all about combining lots of layers, colors, techniques and well, media, to create a work of art. So that's what I went about doing on two different journals. For one journal, I used white glue to attach torn strips of leftover cardstock (recognize the cardstock?) to the cover of a journal. For another, I used plain ol' white acrylic paint in a messy layer on the cover.

There's a close-up of the torn strip cover. I took a sponge and brown ink to go over everything. This really helped tie all the pieces together and give it a more vintage look. Then I attached a few embellishments that I had in my leftover embellishment container.

I also stamped around the edges with a grungy background stamp to fill in some white areas and to tie the cover in with those pink butterflies.

On the white-washed passport I pulled out tons of coordinating inks plus lots of vintage travel-related stamps and went to town making a stamped collage. If you try this, the ink will smear pretty easily (I used mostly dye inks, except for the black), so pull out a heat gun and dry it between stampings. I also sponged ink around the edges, and definitely, you want to dry your stamped images before sponging.