Sunday in the Art Room-From the Archives

   Hi everyone. Happy Sunday. I hope your weekend is going well.

   Today I am joining Gillena for her Sunday Smiles and also Nicole for her Sunday in the Art Room, also known as SITAR.

  Last Sunday I showed you a few travel journal covers. Besides travel journals, I make other books that tell stories.  I  love making books and telling stories.❤ I'll try not to bore you with too many journals I've made, but I've gotten inspired to pull out some old ones.

  Lately I've been working with the more usual paper journals. However, I do occasionally get the urge to sew and make cloth books. I like the challenge of making cloth books because they aren't quite so straight forward as a standard paper book. 

   For one thing most cloth isn't very rigid so you either have to fix the cloth to be more rigid or you need to attach 2 pieces of cloth to make a front side  a back side. If you are going to attached 2 pieces of fabric together to make a front and back, you have to remember that if you sew on  one side, those stitches will show up on the back side unless you connect the front and back pieces after you have finished each side. Plus you need to decide how rigid you want your pages, and if you want some rigidity, you need to decide what to add between the front and back fabric pieces  (like interfacing, cardboard, wood) to create that rigidity. 

   And then you need to decide how you want to bind your pages together. That's a whole other thought process but I won't bore you with that today.

  Last week I dug out a couple of my cloth journals. I decided to focus this post on one of them. I wish I could actually remember when I made this journal, but I know it's been at least (if not longer) 15 years. It's one of my early books. I can tell by how some of the pages are decorated. My style has changed and (hopefully) improved; I was still in the load the page with things stage when I made this. 

  I still like most of this book. So here you go. Here's some pages from my magical moon circus book.

I'm not super crazy about the front cover, but I still really like the ruffles I sewed and added along the binding.

This (above) page is my favorite. I don't know if it was my favorite back when I made the book. The moon face was stamped and then painted.

     I made little triangular pockets and put some paper ephemera into them.

    It bugs me that the kitty's backside is hanging off the moon. But I love the moon. And I like the kitty too. The bottom of the moon is blue cloth and the top is a piece of acetate. In between I stuffed some fun angel hair fibers. I could have fixed it by making the moon wider. But I shouldn't second guess myself. Journals are ways to capture where you are at a particular time, and I'm impressed with myself that I used  so many  kinds of media.  And use them well together for the most part too. 

    There's probably too many little metal discs on this above page, but when I made the dancing lady I wanted the page to jingle like a belly dancer does when she dances. This page does jingle. So maybe the discs are OK.

 I really like this stencil/painted back cover.

     Here's a couple more pages. The last 2 photos show the veil and then the veil lifted. Which,if you read quote, is why I created a veil.

   I hope you enjoyed the views. Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week.