Tag Archives: journals

Book blocks, glue and leather

Whew. In addition to mowing the lawn* I managed to finish that fat stack of 7 hedgehog/ moleskin notebooks I've been sitting on for close to 2 weeks. The elastics and envelopes went in in no time and pressed for a few hours. In that time I glued 6 more blocks into leather covers.

I pulled the finished books out of the press, signed and dated them, stuffed business cards in the pockets and then shot pictures. Edited said pictures and then listed all the items to my artfire shop. It went smoothly and everything looks good.

Thursday I visited my friend in Swampscott and she had been hoarding some paper and advertising posters for me. I walked away with 20 or so posters and about 2 reams of paper. I'll be able to use the guillotine to chop them up into nice matchbook notebooks. The posters are already chopped to size and will be stored until the next time I make a big batch of jotters. I also got some plastic posters that I use for jigs. I set up a jig to make covers with some of the left over scraps as the spine with some great backer board as the cover. I picked up some 30×40 sheets of backer board at the Charette clearance sale in Woburn.So I'm going to try out some new books and stitches. Fun stuff planned.

Tomorrow I'm headed to Western Mass to help a friend set up an ArtFire and an Etsy shop. I"ll spend the afternoon testing out my skillz.

*no small feat considering that it's rained every weekend for the last 3 weeks and I've not been able to mow for that whole time. The grass was halfway to my knees and I"ve got an electric lawn mower… It wasn't pretty.

Book Board

I made a few covers book board and paper from my stash of decorative papers. I made them to specifically cover hedgehog book blocks. So each cover is 3.5×5.5 inches and the spine is .75 inches thick.

To go with these covers I made some paper covered hemp cored headbands. These are glue on style and you probably can’t see them in the pictures, but they are there. I used dark red/burgundy colored washi paper. I used it because it’s thin, glues easily and I knew would wrap around the hemp cord with ease. I also knew that once it was glued up it would become stiffer than it was before and even with that the washi would absorb glue easily as I stuck it to spines. I’ve seen several other methods of making end/head bands before with fabric, paper and one I particularly liked was one that uses ribbon.

I’m listing one of these to etsy, one to ebay and keeping one.

 

Img_4891

Img_4892

Img_4893

This one will go on eBay.

Img_4897

The one above is mine. 🙂

Img_4901

Img_4918

This is a shot of all the other covers that I’ve made. I"m pretty happy with how they came out now I need to make some more bookblocks. 🙂