Hello everyone, Jil here! Ria and I have been experimenting with new techniques and textures for our traveler’s notebook pages. Halloween is this month, and Ria wanted to document her son’s love for scary masks.

Ria gathered orange elements from the Autumn Whimsy kits for this spread. Beneath them she created a wonderful, cross-stitched BOO! We love the texture and interest this adds to the page.

As you can see from this close-up shot, a simple cross stitch is easy to do on the kit’s TN grid paper–just refer to the lines as your guide. Such a great finishing touch for this cool page with its absolutely awesome photo!

Even though my page is mixed media, it also features “sewing.” I used watercolor to paint stitches, Sashiko style.

Yes, this is a page about mushrooms! I love cooking with them and eating them in all sorts of ways, including raw. Since the many mushrooms in the kit are so delightful and whimsical, my mixed media stitches attempt to mimic that style with a loose, messy pattern of arches at the bottom and around my title work. It was fun to work with the gorgeous colors of the Autumn Whimsy kit!

This close-up shows that I used a variety of Cocoa Daisy letter stickers along with stamps to create my title. My embellishments draw on the die-cut and puffy mushrooms, other puffy stickers, the deep red pearls, lots of washi tape, and some buttons because they seemed to go with the painted stitching.

I created my spread on paper from a sketchbook TN, but you could certainly use cardstock or watercolor paper cut to size. This detail shot shows how much fun it is to choose and arrange kit elements to create embellishment clusters over the painted background.

We encourage you to try these simple techniques in your own notebooks–stitching, painting, or painting stitches!