Interactive Journaling

By rowarrior

Have you ever had one of those layouts where you wanted to pour your heart out in your journaling but didn't want the world and his wife to see it when flicking through your albums? Or have you ever had so much to say you've found it wouldn't fit in the space you allocated to journaling? Then interactive journaling is for you!

To hide everything you've written, you first need to decide what you want to hide your journaling behind. Photo mats are ideal for this, but you need to decide that you're going to use them before you stick them down! Work out the amount of border that you will need to stick adhesive on on three sides of the back of the mat. Next you need to measure the remaining space and make a basic tag that is small enough to fit in there – remember since it will be interactive, it won't be stuck down, so you can print on both sides if necessary. Once you've added your journaling to the tag, you need to give it a tail of some sort that can hang out to allow you to pull the journaling out. A ribbon stapled to the end can give the appearance of an embellishment for the photo mat as well as being functional here. Now stick your layout down and hide your words away.

The other approach to hiding things can also be used if you have too much to say. This involves having a ‘flip up' on the page. To create your flip up you can:

•  Fold your paper in such a way that you have 3 faces to journal on, eg:

You can now sick the back of the bottom part of your paper to your layout and either add journaling to all 3 faces, or put a photo on the top face, and just journal inside

•  You can add hinges to your page – either the MM-style ones, which have an eyelet-type back to them and attach to your paper in the same way as an eyelet, or the hardware style ones which can be attached with brads. Again the front can be a photo or journaling.

It is also possible to have a multiple of flip-ups which fold up on your page on top of each other eg:

Examples below show a variety of ways of hiding your text, although I admit my interactive requirements are usually related to my long-windedness!