These books are a gift for the coworker who took enough time out of her busy schedule to rain me for the position that I now have. Needless to say I’m pretty grateful about her spending the time to train me thoroughly without that training I don’t think I would have gotten the job.

I made the gift bag from a sign I scrounged from the recycling bin at work. The covers of these recycled notebooks are also made from the same sign. The inner paper is a heavy weight 28 or 32lb paper with some nice flecks in it.

These signs are MUCH stiffer than the signs I had before. They are made to be viewed from a distance so they look out of focus on the screen but I assure you- they aren’t.

I also found that when I cut these signs up that they can lead to some very. . . interesting imagery. And I may have to make a series of books based on this imagery, because it can be found on all the signs. An explanation, because these signs are big and they have pictures of people on them they have the normal folds and wrinkles associated with facial features. When I cut the face section out to utilize the guy’s smile and eyes, it left a section of his neck, and the fold where his chin met his neck. That fold when cut down to book size looked just like, well a shaved part of the female anatomy. For whatever reason I find this absolutely hilarious. So I may make a groups of “adult” get your mind out of the gutter books even though they aren’t really those parts of the body. The images remind me of the email/spam that went around a few years back of pictures just like that. Little sections of pictures taken out of context.

Just 12 hours left on the journal pictured below. You can see it here.

Also I was able to do a little work in the studio the other day so I have a few hedgehogs and I’m working on some recycled journals to list on etsy. I’ll take some pictures of those later today and get them up quickly.

I am highly amused by this story:
Work Journaler

For many reasons, I think the main reason being that she went after unemployment and secondly that she was dumb enough to save it all on the work computer.

As someone who is a budding technology professional I can tell you that in terms of work computers someone is ALWAYS watching and everything you do on a work computer is always accessible to someone above you. It’s all very big brother but typically if your company owns the computer they can look at anything on it, nothing is private. And most company policies follow that rule.

I just loaded up pictures of my hedgehog spine work to my Flickr account. Check it out here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leslieherger/

I’ve been working on this book for what seems like ages, it has been months.

This book has 100 pages of Strathmore drawing paper, printed with lines. It’s 90lb or so and ivory in color. There are 3 hidden pockets within the journal. I’m not telling where they are because that would ruin the surprise. It has my usual flap and strap closure.

The really neat thing about this journal is the spine. Because of the Frankenstein style of this book the pine had special requirements. The franken part doesn’t transect the spine quite in the middle and it’s at an angle. So I had to take that into consideration when sewing the book. What I did was make the two sides of the book alike but not identical. When I design a spine I usually use a ruler and a triangle to be sure that all aspects of the spine are identical and are symmetrical. When I did that with this book it looked stiff and off. So I went to town on this spine freehand and eyeballed all measurements. I think that the small amount of looseness achieved by eyeballing the whole thing made all the difference in the world. The spine now fits perfectly with the rest of the book.

Integrated into the front cover is a PenSlip.

Anyway take a look at the pictures.

Another good thing going on this week, my brother’s presses are selling! He’s completely finished another and will send me pictures of it today so that I can list it. Which is pretty cool or so I think. I’ll post pictures and a link once he sends them to me.

Because the craziness of the week I haven’t had a chance to write anything about the ebay and etsy sweep! Very exciting news, I’ve made a ton of great sales the last few weeks and because of it my etsy stock is very low. As a seller I suppose a lot of sales is a great problem to have but as a maker of those same items I’m taking a look at my stock and panicking ever so slightly, in a totally good way.

I did get to list the book below on eBay on Tuesday (seems so long ago) and you can see the listing here!

Holy Moly what a week! So I accepted my new position and my current boss went into panic mode. So I’ve been working like crazy these last few days. I’ve needed to have several meetings about what I do (buy flowers) and how I do it (practice makes perfect). That being said my boss’s nervousness made me a little nervous. So in addition to all that I currently do I had to spend a lit of time writing things down and thinking actively about what I do and recording it for the people who will be filling in while they hire for someone else.

So obviously I’ve been pretty darn tired when I get home.

So this week bookbinding has been on the back burner. Today however is another story, I’ll bin the studio all day. Or that’s the plan!

I have planned:

Cutting the spine into the cover of a very complex special order.

Gluing up 3 hedgehogs with Stonehenge paper.

Taking pictures of the hedgehog process.

Among several other things. I’m hoping to cut several covers today too.

Yesterday several half hides arrived, one jet black super smooth cowhide and another brown marbled finish. They are awesome hides. I can’t wait to cut some covers from them and see how they look. Normally I’m not a fan of cowhide, but I’ve started to like it for a few redeeming qualities, mainly it’s superior stiffness.

I didn’t get to announce the great news! The job that I mentioned below that I was interviewing for on Monday I was offered and accepted.

What does this mean in terms of the studio? Well I won’t be so darn tired after I get out of work. (I hope anyway.) While the new position is with the same company it is a less physically demanding job and should leave me with enough energy after work that I can have time and be awake long enough to work in the studio. It also means that I can work a regular schedule, essentially 6 to 2:30 every day and I should (hopefully) have my weekends off and I’ll have 2 days off in a row, which never happens now. Basically I’m hoping this job will leave me with more time to work on studio related things and will leave me with more energy.

This position is physically further away but due to where and how I’ll be driving I’ll really only be on the road an additional 15 minutes. I almost forgot to mention that I’ll be starting the weekend after valentines day.

Sorry for the text-laden posts these last few days but I swear I’ll get to some nice pictures ASAP.

I thought that I had an easy fix on my hands when the pipe below the sink became dislodged and water leaked all over the place. I took a look at it and thought that it would be a quick and simple repair.

That night I hooked it all back up in 10 minutes or so. There didn’t seem to be any more water coming form the pipe under the sink. So I put the heater under the sink and let it dry out the very saturated bottom of the cabinet. The next morning I got up made my coffee, only when I rinsed the pot I heard a familiar dripping of water that wasn’t inside the pipes, looking below my sink I saw water dripping along the bottom of the pipe I had reconnected the night before. Cursing my lack of skill with a monkey wrench I got myself under the cabinet. Only to find that the leak was not from the pipe I had reconnect my sub-par monkey wrench skills had bee enough to tighten the pipe and connectors. What my skills with a wrench could not fix was the ancient copper tube under the sink that had corroded over time to become a very effective sieve.

When I pulled the pipe from under the cabinet I was met with a great deal of corrosion, and a nasty white sludge that had probably kept the leak slow over the past few years, and of course the last year and a half of this house’s existence was unoccupied so that sludge was probably hardened into a cement.

I then drove my butt to Home Depot purchased the wrong items for repair came home screwed up the repair. Royally ticked myself off and then drove back to home depot bought the proper tools and items for repair. When I came home with the right stuff the repair took me all of 20 minutes, including clean up time.

Obviously this took the majority of my day off to accomplish.

I didn’t get to spend much time in the studio at all. I did have just enough time to tear down 3 books worth of Stonehenge paper in 3 colors and stitch them up into book block which are resting in the press until I get home from work. Tonight they will get glued into blocks and then hopefully the next day end up in book form.

I also have finished the final format for a book I’ve been working on for 2 months now. While I was under the sink I gave the book a lot of thought, it’s funny how some around the house items are pretty mindless and I can think of other things. Although an overriding thought during my stay under the sink was that I really hope that nothing else goes wrong with the plumbing ‘cause I really hate it, really hate it. I also thought a lot about how the house is structurally sound but little things like pipes falling apart and the toilet running are probably going to happen a lot over the next few years.