Making Nature Journals

Even though Lewis and Clark is so last week, we couldn't quite let go of the expedition! We decided to make authentic nature journals so that we could go on our very own expedition around our neighborhood, looking for new and unusual objects in nature. I'm not sure these are actually authentic, but they are about as authentic as we could make them! No staples or tape, and they had to be covered with some type of deerskin looking fabric to make them "waterproof". Here is the finished product:


First we prepared our paper. We got about 5 or 6 sheets of plain white paper (from our printer) and folded them all in half, then set one aside. We cut slits in the rest of the pages, directly on the fold line, about 1.5-2 inches in on each end. The one sheet we had set aside got a long slit cut right in the middle along the fold, not all the way to the edges. Then we loosely folded the other pages the long way (a "hotdog" fold for those of you who do lapbooks) and slid them into the one paper with the long slit in the middle.

After sliding them together so that all the original fold lines matched up, we opened up the pages and had a nice little book with no staples or tape!

Then we laid our paper on top of a slightly larger piece of fabric which was brown and soft on the outside, to simulate deerskin.

We folded the edges of the fabric over the front and back page of our paper book and began sewing. We had to be careful to cut short slits in the fabric right at the spine so that we could fold it over and sew it to both the back page and the front page.

Then it was time to embellish our covers. We choose leaves from the yard and laid the leaves on a piece of paper put on top of a piece of wood. The paper was there just to prevent the wood from staining. Then we covered the leaves with a small square of muslin, taped the muslin down so it wouldn't move, and began pounding the muslin with a rock in order to transfer the colored "juice" from the leaf onto the muslin. This took patience but looked just great when finished!

We did glue the muslin to the covers of our journals, because we didn't think to sew the muslin to our covers first before assembling the book.

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Muslin: $1.00

Deer looking fabric: $3.50

The experience of making our own nature journals: Priceless!

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In my next post I will share about the nature walk we took with our new journals!