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I’ve been in a journal-making mood lately. In that regard, I bought some very old hard covered books from a nearby used bookstore for 25 cents each.  I removed the pages from one to use as a journal cover.  Then I collected a bunch of stuff that was sitting around in my workroom for too long —  a bunch of watercolor and drawing weight paper that I colored with Procion MX dye and acrylic paints, a piece of painted tyvec, and a piece of pretty decorative paper — and got busy making the book.

I used a machine zig-zag stitch to attach paper that could fold in and out.  To do this, butt one paper along the side of another, but not snug to the edge.  Set the machine to a wide zig zag so that you can catch the side of each paper, and sew up the edge.  I saw that type of fold-out page in a book made by my friend, Beryl.  Great idea.

The book has a really good feel to it, and the paper is hungry for different types of media.  I haven’t decided whether to do anything to the cover.  I like that the cover is quiet.  For now, I’m leaving it.

There are lots of good book binding tutorials on the web.  Sue Bleiweiss has many free, full color, downloadable PDF tutorials on how to make a variety of books, journals, and other goodies.  You can find them here.  She sells some of her beauties, too. There are loads of instructional books.  I have some listed here.  If you’re looking for a good online course, check out Diana Trout’s Rescue Book Journals Online Class.  She shares lots of good information, and the class inspired me to gut an old book to make this new one!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 at 12:43 am and is filed under Journals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.