Sketchbook Project: A Counterfeit Smashbook

A while ago, I signed up for The Sketchbook Project . . . a collaborative art project which sends blank sketchbooks to people who promise to fill them up and send them back.  The returns are cataloged and then sent on tour for people to visit and examine. You have to choose a theme (from their list) when you sign up, and I chose "In 10 minutes" because I wanted to try to complete each page in a relatively short time.  Recently, my sketchbook arrived (along with the t-shirt I ordered).  You can see above it's a plain craft 5x7" booklet.  My original thought was to create backgrounds on each page in the sketchbook and go from there to fill the pages.  
But, then, I saw this really cool post at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog all about
smashbooks . . . a smashbook is a cross between an art journal and an old-fashioned scrapbook (where you store memorabilia and other scraps).  CKCB is running a summer-long challenge and tutorial to create a smashbook.  I decided I could totally do that with my sketchbook! So, I started with this video from Two Peas in a Buket about the K&Co. Smash Journal line, which I decided to counterfeit:

To create my own version of the smashbook, I started with a pile of supplies including journaling blocks, transparencies, tags, file folders, envelope and artists tape.  I also selected two colors of ink:

Next, I selected an assortment of stamps, including some sentiment stamps:

From there, I sat down and began creating the background pages in my sketchbook that I will add to later.  There's over 30 pages in my sketchbook, and I was able to create fun background pages pretty quickly.  Here's a random sampling of ten of them:

You can see I tried to leave enough blank space on each page to create a page, but I wanted the backdrop to give me a sufficient jump start that I could actually create each page "in ten minutes." From there, I went ahead and decorated the cover:

And I'm proud to say that it took me less than ten minutes to do the cover!  I might put together a kit which counterfeits the types of accessories sold by K&Co. to go along with their smashbooks, but I'm still thinking on that.  I can't wait to start filling it.
So, have you  heard about smashbooks? What do you think of the whole idea?  They seem to me to be the latest "everything old is new again" hot-hot trend, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it works out.