Holiday Journal Book Making

 Hi everyone. I must say I've been in a low key mood today. Back to work after several days, and many of us (including many of my students) were moaning and groaning about the embarrassing election results here in the US. But the hubby came home today from the hospital! Yahoo! I am taking tomorrow off so someone is home with him, so that gives me a 4 day weekend. I am very excited to have some home time- and maybe I will even get into the studio.

Or at least I can hope!

So a few weeks ago I showed you a new arty book I picked up.

In this book I learned a new book making process which I wanted to try. So I made myself a holiday journal. (I did this all before the hubby's heart surgery.)

I'll warn you, this my first attempt at the technique, and I'm rather messy to start, so bear with me. The beauty of making something is that it has little flaws. They just give the finished project some personalized character. :)

I cut the covers off an old library book I picked up on the "please take for free" table.  I covered the covers with some holiday fabric. Then I used some book binding tape to make the spine.

To make the book signatures, I folded some water color paper in half  and made the little signatures using 2 pieces of this folded paper. Then I took each of these and ran the fold through my sewing machine. to connect them.

Then I stacked the signatures  and using a needle and thread, I hand stitched up and down through the outside of my machine stitching to connect all my signatures.

It was a bit of a challenge finding the best thread to do this with. I started with waxed binding thread, which was too thick, and then I moved to regular sewing thread, which was too thin and kept breaking. So finally I used some machine embroidery thread which worked great! After they were stitched, a cut a piece of gauze, and using white book binding glue, I glued it on the edge. You can see that above.

After it dried I used some red line tape, as you can also see above, to attached the outside of  each side of the pages to the cover.

 Like a professionally bound book, it leaves space between the spine and pages.

 I started working with a little cover decoration. There's more to it, but I've yet to take a photo of that, so you'll have to wait for another day to see the finished result.

 I wish I had taken more photos are I made the journal instead of waiting to the end, but next time. I really like making my book this way, so I will do this process again.

Not much else new here.

Thanks for visiting.