MOPS Craft - DIY Journal Welcome Gift

 DIY pocket journals made an excellent welcome gift & craft at our first MOPS meeting.

For our first official MOPS meeting, we wanted to create a "Welcome to MOPS" gift. My clever crafting partner, Traci, came across these adorable pocket-sized journals from cremedelacraft.com. We were inspired and thought it would be great to make this journal our first craft and gift. To make the journals a little more special, I designed some information pages to fit inside. They featured our theme logo for the year, a place to write contact information, a list of all our upcoming meeting dates and blank pages for meeting notes.

Inside pages of journals.

To save time, we assembled the journals beforehand.  The ladies at the meeting would sew on the button, string closure and glue on the decorative spine cover themselves. Traci and I spent many hours beforehand cutting down over 60 cereal and cracker boxes that would make up the spine of the journal. For the spine covers, I cut down scrap-booking paper leftover from my card making days. We had our church trim the paper inserts to make for easier prep. Now the fun part; securing all that paper to the spine! In the original tutorial, it shows how to hand sew the paper to the spine. Since we had a lot of paper to attach, we thought it was best to break out our sewing machines. A denim sewing needle and regular white thread worked just fine to accomplish the task. We also punched holes in the cardboard spine so the ladies would know exactly where to sew on their button closures.

The paper was sewn to the cardboard spine. Button holes were punched ahead of time.

We provided the ladies with a wide variety of decorative paper and buttons to personalize their journals. Plain linen embroidery floss was hand sewn through the button with an embroidery needle for the closure.

Completed journals!

To download the PDF version of assembly instructions, click here. Or visit www.cremedelacraft.com for the original tutorial.