Taking my devotions to the next level

If you have not yet found Shanna Noel at Illustrated Faith.com, you need

to check it out. I found her by following Amy Tangerine

another talented scrapper, both on many design teams.

Shanna and her team takes devotions and Bible studies 

to a whole new level in using their  "journaling Bible".

I had no idea journaling Bibles even existed - I just wrote in the

itty bitty margins hesitantly or an everyday spiral bound notebook.

Not a whole lot of creative juice going on there.

Although if you guys think about it - you know from previous posts

that I have issues ripping out pages from an 

out of date dictionary so to actually do something in a Bible

wouldn't even cross my mind.

Until now.

Please check out the illustrated faith blog because they can explain

it way better than I can since I have only progressed

to the point of getting the cover done.

So I purchased the NIV journaling Bible - it also comes in ESV version

however, I have mostly used NIV so I stuck with that.

The difference is there are lines in NIV for journaling and on in ESV.

I ordered it from Amazon and danced around for weeks

waiting for it to arrive.

Once I had it clutched in my grubby little mitts,

and after days of waiting for the inspiration and guts to start, last night

 I daintily began to spread some gesso on the front cover.

My thoughts were to keep the cover minimal

so that it wouldn't get too torn and trashed.

I also had the mindset that if I really screwed it up with the paints

 I could cover it up with paper. 

Plan A and Plan B.

 I then spread some watercolors on and after letting it sit overnight

decided that they were a bit bold.

 I became braver and added some white enamel paint to mute

the colors and decided that doing the entire front

looked better than just a colorful blob

in the middle of page.

 As you may have noticed in the past I have trouble stopping,

so adopting a somewhat cautious mindset

I decided to stop here because I can still see the

polka dots, which I like, and the colors seemed somewhat less wild.

 I broke out my Technique Tuesday stamps - that I had forever

and they had a goofy unused quality to them.

In fact, my "g" fell apart. Sigh.

I went with stamps because as you know, my handwriting caves

under pressure - and the pressure would be unbearable.

Although if you peek at the top I did feel brave enough to actually

write the verse there.

I will be using them a bit more - love the fonts I have on hand. However,

when I purchased them years ago I was in my

eecummings phase - where I wasn't using capital letters.

I did find one set that thankfully was all caps because 

I didn't feel right using a lower case "g" for God. 

I kept the cover simple because I'm brave that way.

I picked this verse because I loved singing it in church for the Offertory and 

it just seems right for the start of devotions.

As I progress, which is being even more brave, as I actually 

pu my thoughts creatively on the inside pages.