It’s been awhile hasn’t it? Some of you may be wondering where the heck I’ve been; in fact, I know some of you are wondering this, as I’ve gotten several emails wondering if I’m okay. Well, I’m okay. Here’s the story:

My DayJob, as much as it doesn’t drive my heart, like bookbinding, does pay my bills and gives me insurance, so when it required extra hours I felt it necessary for me to do my part and work those extra hours. So over the last few months that’s what I’ve been doing, working at the DayJob. It hasn’t been especially fun or enjoyable, but it is what it is, a way to pay my bills.

I now know that probably every year I will have to take hiatus from binding around this time of year, essentially Christmas to Mother’s Day. It sucks, but it has to be done. Of course that only stands if I stay with this job. Which depending on what happens over the next few months with my significant other’s position and our buying a home may or may not change my ideas for work. Without going into too much detail I’ve been told by the higher ups that if things continue to go the way they have been that I should think about other locations. This is their way of patting me on my back and saying “Good Job.” It works for me.

Starting this week I’m off my self imposed hiatus. I apologize to those of you who haven’t heard from me in the last few months, but I can tell you that you wouldn’t want my work rushed, it’s much better when I take my time.

In addition to this, I’ve been ill. I was seriously hacking and coughing and sleeping when I wasn’t at work. I had what I would describe as a sinus infection/chest cold thing. It sapped every ounce of energy I had and required to me to spend what little free time I had asleep. I’m still recovering. Not being able to get the rest that I’ve really needed to get well has extended the length of my illness and I think it’s severity.

The cherry on this sundae of a life I’ve been having is the flooding in my area. I live in New England, Boston area and the weather has been insane. It’s rained pretty much for 4 days straight and many areas are flooded. Parts of my town are flooded but it’s not bad. The town where I work; well, that’s another story. There are 4 routes to work and they all have some sort of flooding. It’s dangerous driving and there is some etiquette to this weather. Usually what happens when you come o a deep puddle is that you slow down and either go through slow or let the other person go, especially if the other car is a low slung car. While my little Honda is not that low it is much lower than most vans or SUVs. Now, my head tells me that if I see an SUV headed for a puddle to stop and let it go. Well, I would have done that if I had been given the chance. I was halfway through a puddle when a butthead in an SUV decided to cut the line of traffic and plow through the puddle, fine for him, not so good for me. The wave of water and the resulting wake went high on my car and made it sputter, but not stall. I was barely able to make it to work. Now my car won’t start.

Then to top all this off was that on the way home, C’s car started to over heat and has to be taken to the shop. Now I’m renting a little cracker box on wheels. It stinks of cigarette smoke, BO and the cleaner Enterprise uses to clean their cars. It isn’t a pretty car but it runs which is more than I can say for mine right now.

So expect some book updates in the next few weeks.

There is something to be said for projects coming out damn near perfect. It adds to self-confidence and just makes me feel pretty good.

I’ve had several long-term projects that for whatever reason I’ve continued to put off until this weekend. I started them Friday and they are now more than half done. I’ve made a set of penslips and a stack of hedgehogs. I was unsure of the slips because one was for a renaissance journal, and the covers of those journals are soft. I figured out how to stiffen the slip and make it work for a soft covered journal. The slips also came out very good, if I do say so.

The other project is a stack of hedgehogs made to order with paper sent to me. Strangely enough we thought the cut size of the paper would be significantly smaller than a normal hedgehog, but it came out very nice. I as able to add extra paper to each book and have them be the same thickness as a regular moleskine. I just pulled 3 of the 4 hedgehogs from clamps and so far so good, they have come out great. Te leather is tight and smooth to the text block and my new stronger than ever hinges are working out better than planned. These hedgehogs, I will go so far as to say are some of my best yet. I have 3 more to glue and get ready his weekend and then I can call it quits on the for a few days.

That feeling of getting things done well, is great.

Well, it’s been a long month and a half. The DayJob has been a time suck and emotional drain. Due to circumstances beyond my control I had to work extra hours and some very strange shifts. It ended up being stressful and difficult. I often tried to work on books during those weeks but I ended up making beginner mistakes and ended up screwing up several books. So I decided that I would only work on books while I was rested and able to devote my full attention to the process. Thus I didn’t work much. My days off were spent resting and doing housework, because no matter what that fun stuff always needs to be done.

All in all I learned a lot about myself in these weeks. What? I need a regular schedule, preferably something starting at 7am or 8am and ending around 4pm. I also learned that I need 8-hour shifts and 40 hours a week. I don’t deal well with stress especially work related stress. Not knowing what’s happening with my job sends me into a state of panic and thus stress. As soon as I get stressed it affects my mood, which affects my ability to work on books. In short I need a DayJob again. My DayJob has gone from a relatively stress free work environment to one filled with stress and issues I need to deal with on a moment-to-moment basis. I want something where I go in, do my job and come home. When I come home I don’t want to get a call from work and need to deal with more garbage from work.

I’ve been close to quitting on several occasions. I’m a florist; my job shouldn’t be stressful. However, that is not the case. Obviously it is stressful. I’m not exactly sure what makes this job so stressful lately, but it has been. Certain things about work have been making it worse. I won’t go into specifics here but there are certain things about it that push me to the edge. I’ll eventual figure out what I’d like to do with myself.

To add to all the work stress my partner and I are looking for a place to call home. We’ve found several places we like but not in areas that we like. Sadly we haven’t found something in a town we love. It’s a stressful process to look for a place to live and thus far it’s been a decent process. Not too stressful. The hard thing for us is that we need a place with room for a studio. WE did find one place that we loved, beautiful place, lots of space, but in a terrible area.

Overall, I’ve been tired, ill and house hunting. Hopefully, my health will be better, work will even out and soon we’ll find a house and you’ll see more books and more posts.

So it’s been awhile, forgive me if you can, otherwise, aww shucks c’mon….

I’m planning a more substantial post about all that fun stuff soon, possibly tonight, but to tide you over some books.

I’ve been working on and off lately on some custom orders, below you’ll see some pictures of more renaissance journals, slightly different from those before, but not much.

Enjoy.

Everyone will have to forgive me for going AWOL over the last few weeks. Work has been hellish and I’ve been there a lot. When I haven’t been at the DayJob I’ve been sleeping. In addition to being at work a lot I’ve been fighting off a “wicked nasty” sinus infection. I feel like the worst of it has abated and that I can finally move on with my life. Nothing worse than being sick in a way that doesn’t really show itself other than a runny nose and flushed cheeks. I need a good 4 days off in a row some time soon so that I can rest and recuperate from the BS at work. It’s been a trial. I’ve been very close to quitting on several occasions and the only thing that has stopped me is not being able to pay rent.

I’ve been painting a lot in my moleskine, little sketches, thoughts on work, life events and the media. It’s all I can do with all that’s going on to keep creative.

I have done a few books over the last few weeks. I’ll post some pictures when I have the time. I only have one day off in the next week and a half thought hopefully I’ll get some half days.

(Title is from a She Wants Revenge song. If you like depeche mde at all check them out. It’s a little darker than I usually go with my music but very very good.)

Cut a strip of leather 13 to 15 inches long and 1.5 inches wide. Use a good strong leather, 1.5 ounce or stronger. Don’t use thin appliqué leather as it will just tear. Check out Seymourssi on ebay, great leather.)

I made a jig for this, as I didn’t want to ding up my covers. Cut a piece of stiff card the size of a mole cover and apply a 2 way glue so that you can work with the leather and not have it move too much on you. I used photo adhesive. You could use a low tack double sided tape.

Position the side of the leather so it lines up with a straight side of the card.

Wrap the leather around the card, slightly stretch the leather and line the edges so they meet. Use a pencil or pen that you can see on the leather, mark the end of your overlap.

Apply a very thin bead of glue to the edge of the leather up to your mark. Now re-line up your leather and press down gently, from the center f the strip out toward the edges. This forces the excess glue out. Wipe up any extra glue that squeezes out.

Here you can decide how you’re going to reinforce that glue; you can sew the edges, use rivets, brads, or eyelets. I used eyelets because they give me immediate results and I have ton of them around. Michaels stock a tremendous amount of eyelets, in all sorts of shapes colors and sizes they also have a nice selection of rivet type things that are very cool.

When punching the holes be sure that you place a hole at each corner and in the middle. That’s the only rule, after that go wild.

For this I used only 6 eyelets. It was all I needed, I could have added another 4 and made it heavier.

Here are some gratuitous modeling shots of it on my sketch mole; which I have already abused.

I’ve also included some shots of some proto-types in black. I’m working on them.

I don’t feel like writing intructionbut will as needed. This i for my 3 slot books. View…

I read a page on the moleskinerie recently that had a hack like this. The guy used a ribbon and cut a couple of slots into the ribbon threaded a pen into the slots and glued the ends and slipped it around the cover of his mole and voila! A nifty penholder. I made mine a little different; I used a 1 and a quarter stripe of leather, eyelets to attach and then threaded my pen through the open slot at the top.

It’s not very useful for me because I always keep my space pen in my pocket. I’m going to try and use it for some of my pens but I fits the space pen best, I’m going to try and make a couple of these larger for different sized pens.

They are not exactly easy to make but not hard either. Anyway, check them out.

INstructions later.

I’ve been working on the recycled journals again. Below I’ve got 4 that I’ve finished. I made the covers ages ago.

Recently I’ve been having to work insane amounts at work and the only things I’ve been able to really work on without thinking have been these recycled books. I picked some of my favorite single section sewings and did them 4 times across the spines. I also picked a 2-section sewing and doubled it. It made for a nice spine.

I used unbleached natural hemp for all of the sewings.

The spines are leather form my scrap heap, picked for their size and interesting edges. I glued and clamped these to the stiff chipboard.

Anyway, check them out below:

I’ve been working on these books for quite some time. I think that because of all the time I spent they came out better than if I had just done them. I stayed with one of my initial ideas and ditched a few of the others. One of the ideas that I ditched was using the identical straps I used on the other renaissance journal I made. Instead I took one of the straps and split it down the middle changing it a little. Before I did any of this I picked out 2 covers, one distressed sheepskin and one lightly distressed chocolate brown deerskin. I then picked straps to match the covers. I glued them down and clamped them down for a night.

I toyed with several different stitching patterns to hold the straps to the covers. I knew that the glue would hold them well but I needed a little more security to know that they would stay there forever. So I picked a combination of two stitches, an upright and an X pattern. I like how tough it is and how simple it is.

For the stitching on the spine I knew I wanted a simple long stitch but with some linking. So I broke it up and did each journal with the same pattern but different linking on each book. This way they are related but different.

Each journal has 200 strathmore 24lb, 25% cotton pages in cream color. I used natural unbleached Irish linen to sew it and the inner paper is Thai marbled paper in blue and gold.

These were a custom order so they aren’t for sale.