>So here I am, whiling away some time while Karisa plays Super Paper Mario. I just downloaded the Gimp and put together some pictures of three journals I made last weekend. They’re more of the same, of course, but I like matching papers and trying to get things just right. These three have the decorative paper covers, of course, but they also have the new-and-improved cloth-reinforced hinges and 100% cotton paper pages. Because I love making books that are this awesome. I feel like they could be better, but I’m still working out some kinks. 013 came out fine, but 014 and 015 ended up with their covers overlapping the textblock so much that I worry about the ends of the binding getting accidentally cut, so I think in the future I’m going to make my covers so that they’re about flush with the textblock on the sides that are adjacent to the hinges. Okay, so enough about my stuff, here’s the pictures:

Left to right, these are 013, 014, and 015.

013 is as simple as it gets with black and white paper on the cover – something elegant for the front, something writer-ish for the inside – and heavily waxed, variegated deep-red floss for the binding. I actually made the covers for 013 over a month ago, which is why they happen to be the right size. I had three textblocks set up, and one of the cover sets I made last weekend was experimental and didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to, so I’m going to give it some love before I make that book.

014 is some kind of safari look, another travelogue kind of book I suppose. The paper is actually a heaver linen texture, but the way it’s printed, it looks like large-grain leather and has huge photogenic appeal. Look at it, doesn’t that texture look real?

015 is the guitar journal. I’ve had it in my head for some time, inspired by the wooden logo that fell off of a CD-60 acoustic dreadnought case about six months ago. I held onto it just in case, but then I felt it was safe to use as an embellishment for this journal. Cool guitar paper for the front, technicolor wood bullseye for the insides. . . Karisa says that reminds her of the Who, and that’s cool with me. I want to find something else cool with it, but I refuse to go over the top with embellishment. I like to keep it simple, but I don’t want to get bored with it either.

So anyway, I’m feeling the eyestrain. I spent serious quality time with Metroid: Other M on the Wii this morning, mainly because it’s the only time I have to play video games. I beat the game, and then after the credits, Samus “forgot my phone” Aran decided to go back to the ship on which the game took place to retrieve a mysterious something, I don’t know what. I figured, hey, why not pick up the power-ups that I missed the first time through? Yeah, I couldn’t find the first three, even though they were blinking on my map right in front of my face. Then I ran into something very ugly, something I had to get past to progress, and after the twentieth time of not killing it, I got very, very angry.

I said things to the television that I have not said to it in a very, very long time. I said the “F” word more times than I can count, sometimes using two or three variations of that word in a row. I worry sometimes that the neighbors downstairs can hear me, and then I realize that they probably have their own crap to worry about. I turned the game off and gave myself some space to breathe. I defeated Queen Metroid, I’ll get this ugly dude. Next weekend. One thing at a time.

As proof of my usual good nature, here’s a picture of cats I took earlier with Retro Camera Plus for Android:

Niko, photogenic as ever, could be an LOL cat, but Lola is more of an FU cat. Look at that face!

Over the next two and a half Mondays and two and a half Tuesdays, I’ll be watching English teachers in action at Horizon Middle School and Mandan High School. Starting tomorrow. I have to be somewhere by eight in the morning. Bummer. On the other hand, I’m getting PTO for those days, so I get to come home and actually do homework, instead of getting it all done at the last minute, yay! I should come home and play video games. Halo. That would teach me for taking three classes in one semester. That would teach me good. I’m going to be an awesome English teacher, I know it.

>Ha ha, did I say “this weekend” so long ago? That was my mistake. What I meant was, “when I was so sick of doing homework and trying to figure out my pitifully small working space while trying to keep everyone else happy”. So here it is! You’ll find the pictures after the jump, but don’t skip my awesome description, please.

011 is my first concept of a “travel journal,” or travelogue, as I like to call it. It’s a mappy, stampy, word-cloudy kind of book comprising roughly 120 pages of cotton stationery, postal-printed vellum flyleaves, and real international postage stamps on the outside covers. Very cool stuff, indeed. I neglected to cut a space out of the covers after having measured them to account for the spacing between the cover boards and the spine boards, so the cover sticks out a bit on the fore edge. I thought this would be a marvelous place to store a pen, but I haven’t really gotten around to figuring out how I’m going to accomplish that, so maybe I’ll do it and maybe I won’t.

I made it so that the owner of this book could use either cover as the front; I like to make it a matter of personal choice. Do you prefer Greece/Uruguay/Argentina/Poland/Australia/The Netherlands, or England/Germany/Denmark/Romania/The Philippines/The Netherlands? That’s a huge choice, one that says a lot about you, and I’m not going to make it for you.

>

012

Note: this was originally posted as 011, but I realized that I had been slacking and forgot to post about the actual 011, which is light years cooler than this pink zebrosity. More news to follow this weekend.
My sister asked me to make a book for a wedding present for one of her friends, and I have delivered the quality. This is the first book I will have sold, and I had to charge a little bit more because I had to pass on the cost of shipping the lovely, eye-scalding cover paper (which was hard to find in the first place.) It’s another stab-bound journal in pink and black, with a 5.5″ x 8.5″ all-purpose paper textblock. The cover is pink and black zebra-stripe paper from some scrapbook designer collection, and the book features a pink vellum flyleaf both in the front and back, a pink/black tassel bookmark (I have to figure out how they hide the knot on a tassel,) and a pink/black closure, braided single-strand-style with a charm on the end. Here are a few pictures!

>Well, I just made two more books in the last week, 009 and 010. This is after I sat around making exactly zero books for about a month, kicking myself for not finding the time to work on this, and now it seems I have come back a little bit, a little more inspired. Maybe.

009 is a little recycled bag affair I put together using brown paper bags from Cashwise and Central Market. Honestly, that’s really the only recycling involved with the book, but it saved about ten plastic bags from being used, so huzzah! I reinforced the hinges with strips of cloth cut from a black t-shirt and originally they were too tight, so I had to cut the covers apart and re-hinge them. I thought I would just give up right there, and then I had the brilliant idea of giving the book the quarter-leather look, except instead of leather I would use brown paper and then I wouldn’t have to re-do both the covers entirely. It worked like a charm. The hinges are still a tad bit tight, so I could go a little more liberally on them in the future, but the overall look is good and I’m satisfied. 009 is stab-bound with hemp (which I didn’t wax, but probably will in the future) and features a button-and-cord closure (my inspiration from the interdepartmental delivery envelopes at work) using a single metal button and a piece of waxed hemp affixed to holes drilled through the covers. I’ve read that the brown paper bags can be ironed flat; I think I will try that out next time, because I already have enough bags to make another one, and I know for a fact that pressing the pages doesn’t flatten them. Enough jibber-jabber – here’s the photos:

010 is my first leather-bound journal, I made it in about two hours last night while I was watching Return to Oz and by the time the movie was over, I was putting things away and the book was being pressed by a book topped with two twenty-pound dumbbells. I decided to do something different and less complex than anything else I have seen on the web: I stab-bound it. The cover, which was reclaimed from an old leather jacket I got for free, was cut and the pages were cut and stacked, the text block was knocked up, clipped, and drilled, and then I wrapped the cover around the text block with the binder clips still on it. Then I waxed up some black floss and started to sew the cover on. The wrinkling around the spine was precisely what I was going for, but I needed to go in a straight line while I was sewing the cover to the text block to ensure that the covers would lie flat. It worked out pretty good, and I cut tabs into the ends of the covers where the binding goes around the top and bottom of the book to give the spine a little wraparound kind of look. Then I glued some cardstock inside the covers just to give them a bit of stiffness and pressed the book overnight. It looks great, but I’m thinking of adding some kind of closure, which can be sewn in. That’s that. Here’s the book, in all its visual glory:

>I’ve finished a couple more journals; see the pictures below. The first three show one that I just finished this morning (008,) using the single-needle coptic chain stitch. This was my first attempt, and the only thing I need to remember is to give myself more length on the thread next time. I figured with six binding stations, six lengths would be sufficient (that is, roughly six times the height of the book.) I got all the way to the last hole in the back cover before I had to tie on just a little bit more, and that was annoying because you can’t just tie waxed floss and pull it through a hole in a signature. I got it, though. Mental note: one extra length next time!

The coptic chain stitch is weird, because if the stitches are too tight, the signatures begin to get crammed-in like crooked teeth, but if they’re too loose then the book is too loose and that’s just undesirable. Sigh. It does make for a neat-looking spine, though.

The last picture in this series shows two paper-bound journals I created, the little one (006) in just a couple of hours and the other one (007) over two nights. 007 is a chopstick journal, but I cut off the tapered end of the chopstick to make my job easier. The resulting pamphlet/journal is shorter than a chopstick (duh) but looks good nonetheless.

Actually, 006 and 007 are also my first attempts at trimming the rough edge of the book block (the pages tend to form a point in the middle of each signature, giving the fore-edge a sawtooth look, which is often trimmed flat in mass-production books.) I used a rotary trimmer and got something less than what I desired, but it was still much more flat. I think I could really use a better tool for that.

>I finished journal 005 late last night, using the secret Belgian binding method. It was a great success, and I picked up a couple of tips: 1, bookbinding thread stinks. I’m switching to embroidery floss as an all-purpose binding thread. 2, always, always use an even number of binding stations. 3, blue masking tape will leave stickum, and can tear paper if you’re not careful. The thing I like most about this design is how the covers can flip around like a trick wallet. In the last picture, the front cover is flipped over with the very first page facing. This design could sell quite easily, I think.