For about the last 20 years, my husband, myself and my kids celebrate Thanksgiving with my brother, his wife and two children. Over the years, we have established different traditions that take place over the multiple day visit with each other. Besides eating way too much food, drinking lots of wine, exchanging Christmas gifts (because we will not see each other over Christmas), going out shopping on Black Friday, etc. we make sure we have a craft each year as a keepsake of that Thanksgiving. The kids have always loved making the crafts and so does my sister-in-law Penny and myself! Now that the kids are all in their twenties (the two youngest will be 19 soon) they still want a craft, but we can get into trickier projects. We have had some good projects, last year we did glass etching with etching chemicals where we designed our own wine glasses and used them with our Thanksgiving meal, very cool project. This year, the project was our most aggressive to date. We made cloth covered journals from scratch in traditional bookbinding style.

Here are some of the finished journals and some snaps of the project.

The project starts by making "signatures," which are the pages of the book. They are hand stitched together on the spine. This way the book lays nice and flat when open and makes for a beautiful finished project.

My daughter's boyfriend came to Thanksgiving with us this year and here is Ben working on his journal.

My niece Sarah and I are working on sewing the signatures of our journals.

From left to right: Ben, my daughter's boyfriend, Anna, my daughter, Nick, my youngest and Ben (yes, confusing) - my oldest are all working on their journals.

Here is everyone with their finished journals. Penny, my sister-in-law is bottom left and her daughter Sarah is in the middle.

My oldest boy, Ben is big into anything zombies. In fact, he has written an app called ZombieStrategies.com and loves zombie stuff. So, I wanted something real special for him to put on his journal and designed a zombie print just for him. I used Spoonflower and ordered my zombie print to be done up before hand so it was ready in time for our project. You can see the zombie fabric on the journal in the middle, top row. I ordered enough material that I plan to make him some boxer shorts with the extra fabric. You might also recognize the print top row, right from my Blue Skies collection.

All the journals turned out terrific and we all had a great time with the project. I wonder what we should do for next years project!?!?