Chad Alice Hagen is a full-time artist, well known for her work with felt and bookmaking. Chad has worked with hand-felted wool for more than 35 years and is the author of three books about felt making.

When you're faced with a blank canvas and want to create a background or you have a collage or painting that needs a focal point, reach for a stencil.

If you want your art journal pages to have a cohesive look, I have three tricks to share with you today, courtesy of Kari McKnight Holbrook.

You know the expression, "You can't tell a book by its cover." I think this is especially true of handmade books, because when you open them up, you never know what will (sometimes literally) unfold.

Lately I've been going through family photos, making piles of snaps by holiday, season, birthday, and so on. My idea is to put holiday and seasonal groups of photos in a collage frame to rotate throughout the year. For the birthday photos, I want to make handmade books for each of my girls so they can recall their childhood birthdays.

We have a running joke around here. Assistant Editor Barbara Delaney, a former early education teacher, often looks at a process used by a contributing artist (like marble painting with shaving cream or weaving with torn papers) and says, "We did that in pre-school!"

You probably know how to make a book using an accordion fold. But do you know how to bind a book using an accordion-fold technique? I saw Nikki Smith use the technique to create handmade books with colorful envelopes as the pages. A narrow version of the accordion fold makes the spine to which the pages—in this case envelopes—are attached.

A lot of artwork has come through these doors over the years, and I can't count the number of times I've said, "Oh, I wish I could buy that." But I can count the number of times I have purchased a work of contributor art: once. It's a piece of mixed-media fabric and paper art by Dorit Elisha.