Yesterday
while I was trying to kill the last 15 minutes before I had to pick C
up from work I decided to clean my Noodler’s Ahab Flex pen. It’s been
working pretty well, writes nicely, with plenty of flow. It was in
desperate need of a good cleaning. So I gave it one in plenty of warm
soapy water. Everything got a good scrubbing, including the tiny
breather tube.

Then
I brought it back into the office for a good once over with my floss
(piece of tin can cut to scrape gunk out of the fins of the feed) and
get it put back together right. I blew the water out of the breather
tube and sat it down, never to be seen again. Did I mention that I had
it working perfectly? Once you get an Ahab tuned perfectly you don’t
really want to mess around with that perfection, you never know if you
will get it working right ever again.

I
searched for it and was nearly late for picking up C, and never found
it. I have no idea where it went. One might think it’s somewhere on my
workbench, but I can't see it. Resolved that I wouldn’t find it again
and prepared to fiddle with the *(&*%*^*&* pen for
the rest of the night, I put it together with 9 fins showing and the
nib fully seated.

And wouldn't you know, it works perfectly and if anything, better than before.

Oh and later I'll  have my first 30 in June post up. Are you playing along?

If you are interested in joining in with me for the 30 in June Challenge, here's an image you can post on your blog or blog post:

And here is the code for blog loading:

<a title="30 in June by lessherger, on Flickr" href="https://comfortableshoesstudio.com"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://comfortableshoesstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/8901630644_ee3c7a087d_n.jpg" alt="30 in June" width="168" height="223" /></a>

Just copy and paste the red text!

Let's bust out of our journaling habits and try some new things!

Read about it here and here.

You
might think that because I'm working so hard on  "My Headlines and
Stories" and making books that I'm ignoring my art journaling. While I
might go a day or so without art journaling I'm definitely journaling.

I'm
also getting ready to do 30 in June. Which I've mentioned before as my
method of getting back into the daily manner of art journaling, which
I've definately NOT been doing. I wrote about the 30 in June here.
(Let's see if I can remember to link that up when I post this…) Small
5×7 pieces posted to the blog, daily along with being put on Etsy. Yeah,
I'm going to sell the art journal pages. Why? No idea, but the thought
was to keep me honest and force me to have a goal in their creation and
to keep creating. Without a forced public goal (blog post and etsy) what
is to keep me creating? I think eventually I'll be able to just create
on the positive vibe of the art making.  Who am I kidding, I like goals,
I need goals, so I give myself goals…

Do you want to join in or just watch the fun? Starting June 1, watch here for lots of art journaling experimentation.

I’ve
been making these recycled covers for a long time, and with the
exception of the beeswax on the hemp cord, they are vegan. Yesterday I
decided to try and make them 100% vegan.

Beeswax
acts in a couple of ways when binding books, first it keeps your thread
or cord from tangling. Secondly, it helps the cord to pass through the
stations as you sew. Lastly when you tie a knot the beeswax helps it to
stick in place. I also notice that it improves my grip on the needle,
since the wax is slightly sticky at body temp.

Since
the hemp cord I use on these books doesn’t tangle I decided to omit the
wax altogether. Big mistake, the protection the wax gives the cord as
it passes through layers of paper keeps the hemp from fraying and
getting too fibrous and insightly.

I
have some paraffin leftover from canning. I decided to test that out.
Instead of melting to the cord as it passed through the wax, it was as
if the cord cut it, like a chain saw, leaving behind lots of tiny little
flecks of paraffin all over me and my workbench. What a mess. the
paraffin on the cord was also in these tiny little pieces. I used a
lighter and carefully heated the wax and melted it to the cord. It
worked really well. However at body temp it made my hands very slippery.
I had to use a pair of pliers to pull the needle and cord through the
paper.
My
next experiment was to melt a small puddle of paraffin onto a piece of
cardstock and pass the cord through the melted puddle of wax. I used my
fingers to press the wax into the cord a little bit and to pull off any
excess. This seemed to work the best of any of the methods.

I’ve
got a couple of unscented candles that are made out of other waxes and
don’t contain any beeswax, so I’m going to mess around with melting the
candles along with some paraffin to see if I can get a wax that works
better.

The covers freshly cut from signs.
These banners were all about 3 feet high and 8 feet long. One was only 1.5 feet high. They had brass grommets about every foot and a half which really screws up with my ability to use ALL the poster. I can either cut 3 inches from each edge or cut covers from between the grommets. I chose to cut between the grommets.Interior pockets, with ID tag sewn in. I use a jig to keep placement of the tag similar on each pocket. The tag is first temporaily glued in place then permenantly stitched in place. After stitching the extra thread is removed then seared with a lighter.
The pockets start as a 5.25×8.25 sheet of old cardstock poster. The poster has a top corner folded over. These pockets are then temporarily glued in place then stitched to the covers. I use a zig zag stitch for strength.
27 finished covers including 3 that are not perfect. I will hold off on stitching the seconds for awhile. These covers have some neat patterns created not only by hte images on the posters but the text that appeared on the posters.
I have a few more covers to stitch up before I even get to the task of adding paper to these covers.

Awhile ago I picked up some Staedtler watersoluble crayons. They work okay, but seem to resist melting as easily as other brands. For this page I started with some collage of personal ephemera. I then dusted the page with watercolor crayon shavings and added water. I smeared and moved the crayons around the page with my procaulk tools. After allowing the page to dry I sketched the olde-timey dude and used a stick eraser to remove some of the watercolor crayon to add areas of light in his face. After that I added the die-cut sheep and tissue paper.
In the Pukka tea sachet is a folded up note that was written to me. I added a small tab to allow the note to be removed and read with ease. The sheep, as usual, reflect sheep-like thinking on my part and the author of the note.
I received some neat parting gifts from my coworkers as I left my DayJob. The frog I sketched here was one of the gifts. It's a neato still life subject.

Recently I bought a sample of Pilot’s Iroshizuku Asa Gao ink. I’d read great
reviews of it online and figured I should try it. I’ve tried one of
their gray inks previously and loved it. This one well, read on…

All
of the Iroshizuku inks boast a smooth writing experience. They have
good flow coming out of the pen and lubricate the nib as it glides
across paper. Asa Gao performed well in this respect, it’s a very
enjoyable ink.

I’ve
got it in my Pilot Prera medium nib and my TWSBI 530 medium nib. Both
pens write flawlessly with this ink, on any paper I throw at it. From my
absorbent Canson XL pocket sketchbook to my Leuchtturm1917 dot grid to
my new found HP LaserJet 24lb paper it worked well, even impressively on
all papers. It resisted feathering on most papers but showed some bleed
through on some. Dry time was slower than average, but not by much.

All in all writing was a joy with this ink. 

My
problem with it is the color. It’s boring. It’s straight up blue. There
is nothing that makes this blue stand out from the crowd when compared
to other blue inks. It’s simply a nice blue ink.This is not the ink that will sell you on the Iroshizuku line.

To
me I can get other nice blue inks for a lot less then $28 a bottle. Do I
dare suggest that Parker Quink blue is also a nice blue ink but is a
mere $10 a bottle? It is also a nice blue color that has decent
lubrication, flows well and is kinda boring. Or what about Noodler's Blue? Less expensive, good lubrication, but it's Noodler's.

I
feel like a blasphemer for suggesting this but, if you are going to go
Iroshizuku check out one of their other colors for the wow factor Asa
Gao might have you falling asleep.

I
sat down with my art journal this evening and started to write while
watching some TV. (I love me some Amazon streaming.) I reacted to some
of the personal ephemera from my last days at the DayJob. I wrote and
wrote some more. then I looked at what I had been writing and what I’d
been reacting to and I asked myself the most important journaling
question ever:

Why am I reacting in this particular way to this particular item and moment?

I
looked hard at myself and realized that the answer was in my head. My
reaction was less about the other person as it was about me.

I control my reactions and actions.

While
it’s useful to explore the negative emotions and ideas that come along
with those reactions it’s also important to explore the reasons behind
those reactions and actions. The further exploration is the hard and
most useful part of journaling.

Is
the page pretty? Hell no. I’ll add a few more layers of collage and
stuff but honestly it isn’t a pretty page but it’s a useful page. There
is more meaning to the page than anyone else will ever see.

These pages are an example of some of the work I'm doing for my upcoming zine, "My Headlines and Stories."

I’ve
written before about how I occasionally get bored and draw from the
facebook pictures of my friends. A couple of weeks ago I realized we’re
not all 20-somethings anymore*, most of us are married or are on our second or
3rd marriages. We’ve all got some gray hair and a few wrinkles.

In some cases I bet we’d hardly recognize each other of we met up in person.

*We're all closer to 40 now than 20.