Making a Journal

Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. 

I'm back today with the start of a new project. I've wanted to make a journal to keep track of this year's bees as well as including some bee themed art, and I finally got around to making it.

I am linking this up to Bleaubeard's and Elizabeth's Recycle, Reuse or Repurpose challenge at Art Journal Journey.

It started off with 2 items to recycle. One of those items was this shipping bag.

The other item is the cover of an old book. You can see the back cover on the right in this next photo.  I almost hated to cover it as the plant cell design on it is cool, but then I decided my bee journal would be cooler.  Smile. ( I'm keeping the innards of the book to use on other art.)

When I removed the pages from the old book, I also cut the 2 covers apart. I did this to make covering them easier, and also because I wanted my journal to be thicker than the book happened to be. 

I use a combination of some super sticky red line tape as well as a glue stick to stick the new cover on the old cover.

Once covered, I used some bright yellow paint. The envelope I used was slightly padded so when I painted it it came out with this cool textured effect. 

I then used some tissue paper scraps. I thought this hexagon pattern looked like honeycomb. (Obviously it does.)

To cover up the edges the outer edges of the book, I used some solid black tape. I used cloth book tape for the binding. I could have also used duct tape for the binding, but since I had black book binding tape, I went with that. I also had some metal book corners in my stash, and I decided I would use them here. They'll help keep my black edging tape more securely on the cover over time. 

Here's the outside at this point.

And here's the inside.

Then it was time to make my signatures and bind them to the book.  I made 3 signatures, using white, tan and black papers. 

I used a white marker to mark where I wanted to bind those signatures in the cover, and then I used both my Japanese screw punch (with a small tip) and my awl to make holes for binding.

I also marked those points on my signatures so everything would line up.

As I used my awl and created  my holes in my signatures, I used these little clamps to hold them in place. As you can see I also used my clamps to hold my signatures together once they were punched and before I went to stitch them.

I have a couple of spools of waxed book binder tape that I bought ages ago. Luckily one was yellow which worked perfect with my black and yellow colored book.

And then I stitched in my 3 signatures and also stitched them into the cover.

I didn't like the size of this inner gap between signatures once I got everything sewed together.

I decided to make 2 more small signatures and put them in this space. 

Here's my finished stitched book.

Now I just need to decorate the cover, fill in the inside and do something with all the strings.

I still don't know quite how I want to finish off the outer binding, but it will come to me.

Hopefully in the next few months you'll be seeing lots of bee themed pages.

Thanks for reading this far. Have a great middle of your week too.