Natalie Elphinstone | Making a Children’s Journaling Bible

It’s my eldest’s 9th birthday today – my goodness the time seems to just fly by! She’s got all sorts of plans for her party and all sorts of things on her long list of present suggestions, but I know a handmade gift is always appreciated too. She’s similar to me in the sense that she loves reading, drawing, writing, creating art and I know that bible-journaling is something she’ll really enjoy so I decided to make her a unique version of a simplified journaling Bible.

Yes it’s true that I could just buy her a proper one, and I’m positive that when she’s a little older I’ll do just that. But in all honesty, the last Bible we bought her was lost at church within weeks and I’m just not sure we can keep on replacing them at that rate! At least now if she misplaces this one I can whip up another in no time!

Here’s what I did…

I printed out a bunch of Bible chapters on my regular printer. It’s a standard translation (NKJV) and I just copied whole chapters of stories I think she would enjoy. I shrunk it down so each A4 piece of paper would have two pages on it and then I cut these in half. She’s young – she can read the small print, and this way the size of the journaling Bible remains manageable. I made sure to keep plenty of blank pages in there too so she would have somewhere to illustrate her faith. I bound them all together and made a cover out of patterned paper from the Bella Blvd Whatever is Lovely collection. I was a bit sneaky here because I struck up a conversation to determine which was her favourite paper and when I found out it was the one with all the hearts I made sure it became the cover! I decorated it with tags and stickers and a few enamel dots. So far I’ve got 64 pages in this Bible which is far from being a complete Bible but should give her a good starting point, and by making the spine relatively thick I think I should be able to add more pages to it as the need arises. Or I might just make a new one and call it a series!