A while ago, I received several smaller faux leather upholstery fabric samples. During one of my many trips to my local craft store, I came upon a small travelers journal they were selling for $10. It was made of really cheap plastic that mimicked leather and had two notebooks made from kraft paper and one folder also made from kraft paper. All of these were held inside by very thin, cheap elastic. I purchased it, took it home and made a much better version of it.
I really love the size. It’s more compact than the other travelers journals I make. I have this fabric in lots of other great colors, so I will definitely be making more just like it.
My 11 year old daughter asked me to make a junk journal for her as a Christmas gift. I asked what theme she wanted it to have and she replied “monsters, vampires, ghosts, witches and wizards.
I immediately thought how appropriate this was, since we love Halloween and all things scary. It also reminded me of lines from one of my favorite Blink 182 songs titled I Miss You:
“Hello there
The angel from my nightmare
The shadow in the background of the morgue
The unsuspecting victim
Of darkness in the valley
We can live like Jack and Sally if we want
Where you can always find me
And we’ll have Halloween on Christmas
And in the night we’ll wish this never ends
We’ll wish this never ends”
Front cover made from an altered book
Side view
Inside front cover
Embellishments from vampire book
Ephemera and one of my daughters drawings on tea dyed paper
So what do jellyfish have to do with a new website? Honestly, not much, but this is what my brain feels like right now. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that shutting down my former website www.juliemortillaro.com and creating www.juliedawndesigns.com would be take so long to complete.
Not only do I still have an enormous amount of product photos to edit, this is my first blog post. I’m embarrassed to reveal how long ago I started working on this.
The photo editing is definitely the most labor intensive and time consuming part of this process. The problem is that I can’t just take a photo that comes out with a white background, so I have to spend a lot of time in Photoshop Elements and Fotor to get them to look decent. Perhaps one day I will be able to invest in some professional grade lighting, but for now I have to make do with what I have.
Product photography is difficult for me and tricky at best, but so very important. I thought if I just tried to wholesale my journals or sell them on consignment I could skip this altogether, but that wasn’t the case. I found out that even if you aren’t setting up an online shop, store owners or buyers still want to be able to view your products either online or in some sort of catalogue format.
Thankfully, I found this out before I went out to a bunch of shops with my journals in tow. The night before I was going to do this, I came across an article written by the owners of a store in Austin. It talked about the most annoying things to do if you are trying to get someone to carry your products. I was about to do them all.
So instead of driving around peddling my wares, I started taking photographs of all the journals I had created over the past few months. Had I known I was going to have to do this, I would have taken photos after I finished making each one.
This might also help explain why this is my first blog post, even though I created this website in July.
As far as blogging goes, I’ve always been horrible about it, which is simply not acceptable. So this time, I’m vowing to be consistent and I really mean it this time!
This is going to be a place to share not only my journals, artwork and the creation of both, but pieces of my life and things that matter to me.
So, goodbye for now, for I have many more photos left to edit!
