Last night I started to put the glue on a bunch of leather sheets for gluing up covers. Last night I was able to finish with 9 of them in an hour and a half. Today I spent 2 hours gluing the leather to the backing papers, trimming and reinforcing the spine areas. So far so good. I decided that some of the covers should have differently sized paper in them, so some of the journals will be listed on the website as my stock journals and some will be put up on eBay. Though I’m pretty sure I want to get away from eBay as my main source of art income, I get far too little for the journals, barely enough to cover cost.

After I trimmed everything down to size and made the edges all pretty, I started to lay-out and cut the slots for the spine. In another hour and a half I finished that. (A grand total of 5 hours on 9 covers.) I made what I’m calling the half inch series- all the heads and tails are exactly one half inch from the edge. I’m not doing head and tail bands because of the excessive time they take to sew. These will be my most basic and reasonably priced journals. If any more of my journals go up on eBay, these will be it. I am quite addicted to the positive feedback, regular sales and the gamble of eBay so I may keep on using the service. Getting $10.50 for a journal that took me 2+ hours to makes me a little ill.

Tomorrow I will be completely useless for anything related to journal making. I will be so tired from work that I will probably come home and sleep. Mother’s day is a huge flower holiday and the day job is going to be draining.

I heard back from the guy who is having his emails to his fiancé bound- I’m sending him some leather samples so he can decide on a color for his books. The whole thing is definitely a romantic idea, and anyone I’ve told about the project has said “Ohh that’s so romantic, why can’t my boy/girl friend be like that?!”

I’ve also thought some more on the large scale sketchbook- I think it can be done, I’m just going to have to reinforce the h*ll out of the spine. In the small journals a little tyvek goes a long way and makes the leather 100% more stiff. I think that to expand that 6 inch spine to 11 or 9 inches is going to require 2 layers of tyvek but also a layer of nice stiff paper. I’m also going to have to be very selective with the hide- any separation is going to be very noticeable and cause weakness. That being said, it’s also going to take a full hide to select from, which could be fantastic with the edges!

I’ll get some pics up of those covers tomorrow morning, right now I’m beat and can’t wait for some shuteye!