So My brother has 3 sewing cradles made. 1 will go on my etsy account, one on his and one is currently up on eBay right now. You can see it here He did a great job with them and all the pictures I’ve seen look fantastic.

So over the weekend I’ve been working on a massive stack of hedgehogs. Of the 9 that I made 2 are spoken for and the rest will go to either eBay or etsy. It was good to be in the studio and making hedgehogs. I feel like I focus on one variety of book per weekend. I’d like to expand that and make a bunch of sewn books as well as hedgehogs. Alas I do have a life outside of the studio.

Each of the hedgehogs has a different paper inside, some have Strathmore laid texture with an ivory color, a few have white laid paper and one has Strathmore ice blue wove texture paper. Each one has 160 pages, a pocket, bookmark and an elastic closure. I’m very happy with how they turned out and how the press worked on them.

This is also the first batch of books that I used my new sewing cradle to punch the stations.

This one is up on ebay here.

This one is up on ebay here.

This one isn’t listed anywhere yet.

This one is claimed.

This one will go up on etsy tomorrow.

Tomorrow around 9am Eastern time the press listed on eBay here Ends it’s auction. I’d like to also point out that my brother also has one listed on his etsy account here.

THe original post about the press(es) currently on sale is here

My brother Allen has an etsy shop., it’s called BookWorks. He plans on having the aforementioned sewing cradles and of course his book presses on there. I’m pretty excited about it for him.

His etsy shop can be found here.

I’ll have a link to the right side ASAP.

Just a quickie before bed: This is the sewing cradle my brother made for me. It’s 11 inches long and 6 inches high. It’s made of solid pine. The boards that hold the paper are situated with a gap between them to allow an awl to pass between them.

I’ve put it through it’s paces and it was wonderful. It’s amazing what good well made tools can do to make binding easier.

These will be up on ebay, etsy and my brother’s new etsy shop.

Another interesting item that I had my brother and father recreate/make for me is my version of the sewing cradle. For ages I worked with a cardboard cradle that I made after the pictures I saw on Volcano arts. It worked great. Then I decided I wanted something a little more stiff and permanent, so I designed and tried to make one out of wood, well my efforts with wood were crude at best but served to make a functional but ugly sewing cradle.

So when I went to Maine I took wit me my sewing cradle. Explained my original concept to my brother who said “Oh Yeah we can do that you just use this tool. What do you mean you tried to use the router to do that?” At which point my father said “Your lucky you didn’t hurt yourself.”

The result is a fantastic light weight 100% pine handmade sewing cradle. I put my nerw cradle through it’s paces yesterday with the punching of 8 hedgehog blocks, and it ruled. IT sat flat on my table top and was stiff, allowing me to pucnh through more signatures at once than my old cradle. I’ll post some pictures of it tonight.

As many of you know I’ve changed jobs. I stayed with the company that I’ve been with for the last 4 years and switched to a position that is more in keeping with my interests as well as my temperament. I won’t go into it too much here, but let’s say that I’m a lot happier after a week of the new job.

ONe of the main reasons that I went for it is the regular schedule. IF this weekend is any example, after a brief nap I’ll have very productive days working in the studio- I made 50 assorted notebooks and journals. (Swan a stack of yours are on that list.) That’s a lot of work for a weekend and it pleases me greatly to know that I’ll be able to reproduce that effort on most weekends.

Hopefully the upcoming weeks will leave me a little less exhausted than this week did. IT was the first week and all!

This is what the inside of all the recycled notebooks looks like, on some of the larger books the “team member favorites” is along the top or bottom of the page, but essentially this is what they look like.

I used to read a lot of online blogs and reports on recycling before I became bored with them. One of the things that a major recycling blog complained was that sign vinyl is overdone and too often recycled/reused to make bags or other items. (This is a bit of a rant so move down if you don’t want to read it.) I clearly disagree. I’m pretty passionate when it come to recycling. I love the fact that I work for a company that sends it’s vinyl signs back to a place for making into totes. I think that’s pretty cool.

Let’s face it sign vinyl is pretty terrible stuff for the environment, there’s a reason it’s the materials of choice for signs for the outdoors- this s*&t never breaks down. Where I work has signs from 10 years ago in the attic and its dirty but in good condition(the signs get used every spring.). IN landfills this stuff will be there forever. And let’s not talk about what this crap DOES break down into when it does disintegrate, toxic nasty materials.

All of that is great reasons to use it to make bags (Think freitag) and also the covers of journals. The stuff stitches like fabric, and is easy to work with. It’s heavy but light enough to comparable to nylon canvas. In other word this stuff is STURDY. I’m happy to give it a second life rather than send it to the landfill. I think more people should be encouraged to use this readily available material.

Rant OVer.

The covers are made from sign vinyl. In this case these are cut from a sign that was advertising nuts, so there is some lettering and a few little cartoons of a variety of nuts. The coloring is a chocolate brown. There are a variety of sized of these items. One set is 3.5X5.5 inches and 40 pages. The other set if 5.5×6 inches also 40 pages but with the addition of a hot pink recycled end sheet. These are all available on my etsy shop here.

I call these the fleshy ads. They come form some of the same advertising posters are the other jotters, the only difference is that some of these have flesh tones and not necessarily words. Some do and others don’t. I ove the variability of some of the advertising posters. I also like how durable the paper is. It’s made to withstand some abuse in the stores so it’s very tough. I haven’t had to put one to the test yet but I’m willing to bet that they will outlast some of the other paper covers.

These like the other recycled jotters come in a set of 3. Each notebook has 40 pages of neehan paper, printed on every other papge with light green bands and the words “team member’s favorites.” They are individually machine stitched and hand trimmed.

They are available on etsy here.