Chinese Moon Cake Journal

I finally created the Chinese Moon Cake journal, a week long project I tried to take my time on.

Created using a Chinese moon cake box for the cover, ribbon, thread, brown paper, drawing paper cut to size, scrapbook paper, craft tape, Asian food packaging, a Trader Joe's lemon bag, World Market paper bags, Chinese calendar box, stamping, and Liquitex satin varnish.

Enjoy the video and images. :)

I've had this book planned for a long time, just never knew how to tackle it, inexperienced in basic book arts when I first got this box. 

At one time it wasn't damaged, but later it tore along the lid and was saved for future plans.

 

The front of it is a piece of art in itself, Chinese moon cakes are special occasion sweets for certain Chinese holidays if I recall correctly. My dad got a hold of a box so long ago when he worked at a Chinese restaurant as the delivery guy. I vaguely remember the taste of the cakes, an odd rice dough that was sweet, but rubbery and chalky at the same time, the centers containing a cooked egg yolk. I remembered liking the outer part, but the egg yolk threw me off.

Even so, the box was beautiful with it's dragon....or Chinese phoenix, not sure which it is.

I kept the cover as is, liking the magnetic closure the box had. It looks interesting along the spine and closure side, measures around 8x14. I had to remover the box ends, and at one time the box even had a display holder of yellow satin which held the cakes.

 

Since the front of the cover had been torn away from the spine, I repaired the damage by taping, then sewing gold ribbon over the damaged seam, a way to accent the book and successfully cover up the jagged edge while holding it together again.

 

I also enjoy the metallic symbol on the front of the cover, shiny things always seem exciting to me.

On the inside I added scrapbook paper to accent the yellow, and reinforced my spine with black ribbon. The book starts off with a tuck spot and place to write.

I glazed my scrapbook paper with Liquitex satin varnish before adding it to the inner cover. The tuck spot of the first page is made using a Chinese calendar box, seemed to make the book inviting.

Brown paper and drawing paper were used in the first signature. Only time consuming part of it all was having to hand cut my pages to size using a razor blade, since the pages were too large to cut on my paper cutter.

Tuck spots were formed on some of the pages so I wouldn't have to cut as much paper, and have some places to stick things.

this project was partly done to use up more things from my stash which needed to be chucked or made into something. I remember each of the sweets and why I liked them, hence my reasons for  saving the boxes.

Chocolate mochi is tasty, but kind of expensive.....

I backed the mochi box with speckled scrapbook paper, and added in a Trader Joe's lemon bag for color.

Yellow felt like it needed to be somewhere in the journal, so a lemon bag looks just fine.

More fun with mini books, I made a small add in using paper scraps, a wasabi box, brown paper, stamping, and varnish.

My other decision was to accent areas with blue, a nice color with orange.

World Market paper bags always make me happy, so I added a few.

Brown sugar mochi box with tag addition. I love the box art of this specific mochi.

More packaging, peanut crisps with additional note cards.

The note cards are made using a cookie box.

Since the book was tall enough, I got to use my larger mochi boxes for pages.

More green and orange color coding.

Many of the mochi boxes were originally made for a different project, later to be taped together and used in this.

As always, I like the brown and green colors together.

The back of the book was covered with varnished scrapbook paper and craft tape.

Metalic gold flowers and a big orange blossom seemed to go nicely with the existing themes throughout the book, so I'm happy and hope to one day fill the pages with pretty pictures and writing, bringing more life to the currently plain pages. :P