Artisanal Journals: Learn to Bind Your Own Art Journals

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Artisanal journals bookmaking workshop. In this hands on class, we'll embark on a journey to craft personalized art journals that are perfect for unleashing your creativity. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out. This workshop offers something for everyone. We'll explore various bookbinding techniques from the classic perfect binding to the versatile So binding, allowing you to choose the style that suits your artistic vision. Using high quality materials like watercolor paper and mixed media papers. You'll learn how to assemble your own custom journals ready to be filled with sketches, paintings, collages, and more. I'm Denise Love. I'm an artist and creative educator, and I'm excited to bring you this fun and exciting dive into handmade art journals through step by step demonstrations and guidance. You'll not only create functional art journals, but you'll also gain confidence in your ability to express yourself through mixed media. Get ready to dive into a world of boundless creativity and artistic exploration. 2. Class Project: Your class project. You'll have the opportunity to create your own unique art journal from start to finish. Using the techniques learned throughout the workshop, you'll begin selecting your preferred binding method and assembling your journal with either watercolor paper for dedicated painting space or mixed media papers for added versatility. By the end of class, you'll walk away with a one of a kind art journal that reflects your creative spirit and serve as a canvas for your future art endeavors. 3. Inspiration: Let's talk about where the inspiration for making our own art journals is coming from. I have been working on a big mixed media art journal for quite a while now, I'm filling this one up and it's got different surfaces in it, and I've got a whole video series where you've watched me make each of these pages on YouTube. As soon as I started working in this journal, which is the Dina Wakey Media journal. They sold out worldwide literally. It was apparently the end of when they had made these and I had decided that I was ready to work on an art journal late in the game compared to when they were manufacturing these journals. I got so excited at the time that I was working on them that I'm like, I am going to do all these on camera it's going to help me show up and we can just see what we're going to end up with, and then my dream of having finished art journals that I can just flip through and look at later would become a reality because sometimes you need some motivation to help you show up for your art practice. Me filming them for videos that's how I get motivated to show up and paint. After I bought mine and a couple, another one as a spare because I thought, I could make a class out of painting these journals and I would have an extra for the class and I'd have one that I painted. As soon as I put this in an art hall and then started painting in it, they sold out everywhere and they no longer make these. Oh, that is very sad. Now I've had so many people comment on every video, I wish I could get that journal still, it's not available. I can't find one anywhere. I decided that we needed to just make our own, and then we could have any papers that we wanted in it and we could make it any size that we wanted. You can see how far I've gotten depending on when you watch this class, some of these videos haven't even come out yet. But what I love about this journal is one, it's very large. It's about ten by 14 ", I believe. Is that right? It's pretty big 10 " about 14 ". It's got four different types of paper in it. We've got a cotton watercolor paper, which I believe is the ti cotton paper. It could be some other paper, but it's what it reminds me of and what I know that I can get ahold of. It's also got Canvas pages, and then it's got some burlap or jute some pages, and then it's got brown craft paper pages. And so we are in this class going to make something close that we could at least paint in and have different pages and be able to follow along with these videos with the book that nobody can get. That is the inspiration for making our own books. I have several other art journals that are just rather beautiful that I also am inspired by. This is also another beautiful handmade paper. I like the format that it's longer and got the decled edges. I'm looking at the different sketchbooks and things that I have and thinking, what would I want in my sketchbook? I'm so this one is one I love. Here's one that's made of the Cody papers from the Cody company, and it's just a delightful little book that has a glued binding and paper cover and the watercolor pages. I really like that also. These are the inspiration for where I'm coming from with making this class and making our own books, and what I love about making your own book is you can then put any paper that you love in it because I love papers like the Hanmle border color paper, I really love this one right here. I also really love the Cty cotton paper that I've been painting and using. I also love the Arches coal press. Some of these papers, you're just not going to find in the perfect art journal, and if you make one for yourself, then that's going to be perfect for you and the art that you like to create. There's the inspiration of why I made this class and what we're going to be making in class. I have a couple of books that I've collected because I took a bookmaking class several years ago and there's lots of resources online, lots of videos you can watch. There's A membership out there for making books that have tons of videos in it that I've seen years ago. This is a regular sketchbook. You can see I've got them everywhere. This is just a regular plain sewed sketchbook with a nice cover. Lots of inspiration here for our books here in my office. But anyway, there's 1 million ways to make a book. I'm going to show you a couple of super easy ways so that you'll know that this is not intimidating and anybody can do it. But here's a couple of books that I have on my bookshelf that I pulled out. One is by Natasha Mark OV. Probably did not say that right, but it's this book here, Treasure bookmaking, crafting made sustainable journals. What I like about this book is she makes more of the mixed media junk journals and shows you different techniques for attaching everything and it's a very inspiring book, giving you lots of ideas for covers and the things that you might want to put in the interior of the book and to really push you past, just a white paper with a black cover like this black cover here. My intention on this big book is to paint the cover when I'm all finished to give it a beautiful artistic finish. But I'm not there yet. I still have quite a few pages left to paint and then the cover would be last. But I love different covers like these, we'll talk about in class, different ways to get creative with your journal as we're creating. This one is really an excellent resource. If you want to do more of the junk journal, the treasured pages, the different types of papers that you might collect, including old book pages, papers you've painted, tissue, you name it, and this book would encourage you to get all of those out and make a treasure out of it. If I really like that book, treasure bookmaking. This book handmade books at home is a good guide for journals, sketchbook photo albums, it's a beginner's guide is what they're calling it. It is a little more in depth in creating and instructions. I don't know about you. I do like having books to reference and get ideas, but I find it hard to follow illustrations sometimes and watching videos is a lot easier. But once you watch a few videos and you're like, I got the basics down, then going to something like a book like this would be great for enforcing some of those basics and giving you some new ideas and other techniques and things maybe that you didn't think of. I do like this book for that reason and this is handmade books at home by Bitter Melon Binder by Chanel. Some of these names. I'm sure I'm pronouncing incorrectly. I'm sorry about that. Then the third book I happen to have is making handmade books 100 plus bind structures informed by Alyssa Golden. This book is more of just an inspiration book. I would not at all call it a beginner's book. What it is is there are a lot of artists who have contributed to the book and the projects that they have done it extends even farther than books into making art boxes. While it does give you an abbreviated, here's how I made the book. If you don't know how to already make a book, I don't think some of this would make sense to you. I do feel like you need to at least have the basics, watch a few videos, make a book or two, and then this would be a jumping off point for your inspiration after that because they show you tons of different ways to make covers and different ways of stitching and different things that you might include in your book and some of them are fold out books and some of them are regular books and some of them have glued spines and some of them have sewed spines. You can just see that really anything that you could think of to make into a book, you could make into a book. These and I'll even say a lot of the book club thing that I had been in a few years ago, Really, we're more advanced and it took you longer to make a book than that I think is necessary for a project like what we're going to do. I'm going to show you a couple of very easy ways, a glue the binding way and so the binding way so that we have an art journal that we can then very quickly and easily begin to be using. Here is the inspiration for this class and all of us who can no longer get the Dana Wakey Media journal that I've been working in and people are just having an absolute fit over not being able to find it because it's very scary to work in a gigantic book. But once you're going and you see all the ideas and you're like, Oh, my gosh, now, I feel like I could do this, I want this book. Oh, I can't get it. Okay super frustrating. Now I want to give us all the opportunity to continue following along in my video series as I finish up this journal, and because now we're going to make our own journals, I can then continue this series on into the next year and further on without feeling bad that nobody else can get it. Super glad to have you in class, and that is where my inspiration for this class has come from. I will see you in class. 4. Supplies: Let's take a look at the supplies that we'll need in class. I know I have a lot of supplies here, but they are not all necessary, they are options for us. A few supplies are necessary, but the majority of these are options. I found another little handmade book that I had made when I was in that bookworkshop years ago. That's a fun thing to just take a look at how I made an older book, and then these here are some I was playing with different ideas for class and different ways that we could make interesting art journals for ourself. I made a couple of different ones that we're going to do in class. These are the ones that I already had made for us to just get my thoughts together. This is a hard back glued bound. Watercolor journal made with the di paper, the Indian handmade cotton paper because I've decided after working in this paper for quite a while now that even though I didn't initially like it, now I absolutely love it. These are glued like a paperback book is glued when you're looking at a paperback book. They do have a lot of glue on the spine, but the pages could come out. You could pull that out. If you had a piece of art in here that you absolutely loved, you could pull that out and separate the spine basically because once you pulled one out, you'd separate that glued binding. But what I really like about this is it lays flat. I could do a two page layout and create something beautiful on every page, and then I would have however many pages in here that I glued in and I'd be able to close that up as my beautiful art journal. This one I have finished with a handmade paper, which these are very sturdy handmade papers. I love these and they are good choice for the outside or you can finish the outside with some type of art that you've created, and you can even paint these. This was so easy, it's ridiculous. I know you're going to love possible using that. This type of book would be perfect for things that are flat, drawing, sketching, watercolor, painting with acrylic paint. What it probably is not good for is collage or mixed media that's going to be real thick where you know you're putting a lot of stuff on each page because it does not have the expansion capabilities, really, it's not going to hold up to that. This would be more for flat media, but it was so ridiculously easy. You're going to love it. For most of the stuff that I did in this big journal, I was painting fairly flat pages. For the type of mixed media art that I want to do, this type of book would still be just fine. I actually made more than one size. I made this great big one, which is very close in size to our inspiration journal that we are creating because if you put this up to that, we've got an inch here and 2 " at the bottom. The size is very close, but this is more of a 12 by 88129 by 12. It's a nine by 12 piece of paper that I made these with, and I put the handmade paper on the cover and it's glued. But what I did here was I made this with the Hanam watercolor paper, which is one of my favorite papers to use. I took two pads of paper to create this book. This is two pads of that paper. In a great big book and I like it because it lays flat. The glue that you use to glue the binding is flexible and it's very strong and you should get a lot of use out of that. Again, this is a flat media book for watercolor sketching, drawing, anything like that. But look how gorgeous and professional and beautiful these look. Even when you open it up, it's a beautiful professional look. I love it. I love it. This third example here. Is all the di paper and i paper cover. Instead of a hard cover, I've done a paper cover because I want to paint it and decorate it and it be part of the journal, and it's a very stiff paper paper cover because two sheets are glued together to create the cover when we're done. This is actually going to be a lot stronger than the other books that we're going to create. It's going to hold up to it'll be stronger than this because we're sewing it and This is a really strong cover and we can layer the media in here. We can do collage work. We can make it really thick and bulky and we have the room and the strength in a book like this to do that. This is a book with signatures and we are going to sew these pages in. It's again so simple when we're done that you're going to be like, Wow, why did I never try that before? I made five books in one morning when I was playing and making my samples. It doesn't even take you that long to make a really nice book to work in. Because in this journal, my favorite papers are the watercolor pages, and I want a few different pages sometimes like this one has the canvas and it has the brown craft pages and stuff. While I liked experimenting on the different papers, I did enjoy the watercolor pages the best. And so I thought one of these in all watercolor paper, and you can see there, it's got three signatures that I've put together. But I decided that one book with all watercolor paper for us to paint in would be fantastic. I did make one of those, and then in class, I'm going to make one with a variety of pages. Let's talk about what our basics are. If you get a book binding kit on Amazon, it has just about everything that you would need in this little kit besides your papers and stuff. It has an all, which is very important. This is how we're going to punch the pages in our book. This was $7 for the kit rather than buying everything separately. I just thought I would tell you, that's how affordable this can be. $7 for the book binding kit or you can buy them separately. You'll need an all You'll need a bone folder. I love my bone folder quite a bit and it's very handy for making creases and things and making it really work a bit better with the folding of the papers. You'll need a gigantic needle. I have a set of stitching needles, and then this actually comes with several different needles in this kit. You'll need a needle with a really gigantic head on it because we are sewing a really thick thread with this. I think I just got this at the fabric store. But this is a is a pretty big head on this needle. I don't know if you can see how big those really are. But there's a big it's a big headed needle. It's not a little regular sewing needle. So this might be something that you're sewing heavy winter clothing with or maybe you're sewing, you know, some kind of heavy duty something. And then this kit also comes with waxed thread. You can use different threads if you want. You can get linen thread or some type of heavy duty sewing thread. But you'd need to wax it with a bees wax, like a bees wax candle would work fine. But you want to wax that thread because the thread could be sharp enough to tear your paper or your cover as you're working and if you'll wax it, you'll protect that stuff. I got some waxed linen thread a while back in a couple of different colors and Okay. There's the needle that I was using, but it needs to be a really big head to fit that big thick waxed thread through it. Okay. And then some people use a curved needle. I don't feel like that's necessary for what we're doing. So just a needle with a great big head. But you can get any color that you want. You could just pick a color that's going to match what you're working in so that it's not obvious. I like getting the waxed thread already waxed, but you can use other threads and wax it yourself. I don't know, the wax yourself just adds another step. It's very easy. You're just running the thread through over the digging it down into the wax or whatever to get it wax, but it's just easier and this comes with it. Another thing that we're going to need is some type of utility knife. I like using these so that I can tear off a little section when the knife gets dull, but you do need a utility knife. So this glue is very important. You need some PVA book binders glue. It's pH neutral, it's acid free, it's archival, it dries clear, it remains flexible and it will not yellow. The PVA glue is what most book binders and book recommendations will recommend. I got this off of Amazon as a couple of dollars. It goes pretty far. I've glued several books using this and I still have the majority of the bottle left over, so you can keep using this over and over. Another option. For you is the Aliens original tacky glue, but you don't want the one that's the regular one. You want the one that says acid free because the acid free will be non yellowing. It's photo safe. It's flexible and it is acid free. That's another choice if you're looking at, say one of your craft stores and you find this and you thought, I want to get it today in stock, you can go for the acid free tacky glue. That's your glue choices that I would recommend. I also like having an acid free photof Glut. Glues sticks on some of this are a little easier for gluing handmade papers onto your cover and stuff like that. It's just convenient rather than a B to glue. I do like having that. Those are the major stuff. You need the stuff that comes in the book kit, you need a knife and you need a PH glue and you'd be ready to start with that. It could be a very minimal amount of supplies. It's also nice if you have a ruler because you'll be needing to measure some stuff. In addition to some of these things, I will also be using my RP ruler because if the page is not the right size of the paper, If the paper is not the right size that I want to be creating, but I have torn edges on some of my papers like this right here, if I have four torn edges, but really I want to cut this down and I want the edge to be torn. I like the dual edge ripper to do that. It's not a necessary piece. It's just an option and the reason I like it is because I like the hand torn pages on these books. Look how cool that is to flip it and see all those hand decled edges. Okay. So I do love the RP ruler. I will be using the RP ruler to maybe make one of our books today. And so I've got that handy. You also need to pick what kind of papers do you want in your books. If you're making Adina Wakey look alike type book with the different papers, then pick out what papers you want those to be. I feel like that these di papers are super close to the paper in this journal, if it's not the paper that they used, it's super close. This big A three piece is a good size for making the journal that is almost as big as that, but we only needed one package to make this book. I made this whole book with one package of this A three t paper. I even used two sheets to make the cover. This is 20 sheets. I used 18 sheets for the inside, two sheets for the cover, and that was one pack of paper. You can see how you can keep this very affordable if you had a thing of glue, this $7 thing of book binding and a pack of paper. You could make this entire journal with one pack of paper and those supplies. It could be super affordable. If you're going to want to use different papers in your book, I want a book that does have the different papers just so that I can say, look, we duplicated q as easily as we could. Then you'll need a pack of the cot paper, and I actually ordered a burlap table runner because it was a nice size and it's very similar to the paper in my inspiration journal. It looks like it's got the very similar loose weave. It's very, very close. I'm going to cut up a table runner in burlap for some of my pages, and it'll definitely be very similar. I will say in this book, the burlap is my least favorite to work on. In my book, I might have less burlap pages than my inspiration journal. You'll need to decide what size journal are you wanting to make. Do you want to make the great big journal where we're using the biggest pieces of paper. Do you want to make something smaller? I'm going to be making some smaller journals with the glued binding. I needed for this one here. Knocking stuff off for this one, I needed one pack of paper, and then I used a hard cover and some handmade paper for the cover. But that's one pack of paper to make this book here. That's a lot of pages that we'll have to work on. And that is square eight by eight. It was the square eight by eight package. For the other book pages in here, we had craft paper. Some of these are brown craft paper pages in here, they're working on a grocery bag, basically. If you've got a bunch of grocery bags, you could use those or you could order some card. I ordered some heavy duty card stock I think the card stock that's in the paper might be even a little bit heavier than what I ordered. But I did think that this paper that I got was heavy enough for the journal that I wanted to make. And I believe it's about the same size as the big di paper. Which I had thrown on the floor accidentally, but it's a very similar size. It's not exact, so we have a couple of choices there because in my big inspiration book, some of the papers or the canvas, really, some of them shrink. And so we don't have to have all the pages be all the same size. Keep that in mind. So we could either make them all the same size because you can see here on this, the canvas shrinks a little bit because it's raw canvas. We can either make them all the same size by trimming down our paper, which is what I decided to do. I'm going to be trimming off just a smidge of our paper with the rip ruler that I told you that I was going to be using because then if I ripped it down, allowed me to keep all the edges very consistent with what it already had on it, and then I could use this paper and it be the same size. If you didn't care if the paper were slightly smaller, you could use the whole sheets just as they are. So you can get some brown card stock. Okay. If you want the brown craft pages or if you've got grocery bags that you can cut up. That's another choice. Another thing that I have here is the canvas roll. I did get already had this for another project that I did. This is unstretched Canvas roll. It's acrylic primed, which is a tiny bit different than what's in here because this role has a white primed side and a canvas side. I think for our book, that could be interesting. We could have raw Canvas on one side and we could have a prime service on the back side. I do still think that this will shrink. Like it did here in my bigger book, but I just ordered a role of 24 inch by six foot and I continue to use this for different projects. I'm like, already got some canvas. You can get an old drop cloth and cut that up into book pages if you want that to be your canvas pages. You can see there's lots of different options that we could do. For my hard page books, see if I can grab one without knocking this off. For the hard page books, I have something hard in here. That could be cardboard. Mine happens to be the backside of a sketch pad. If you've got some sketch pads, they were the back of the mule A one, so you can see these no longer have a back on them. That's because I stole the back of these pads to make these hard covers. But you can order bookboard So if you're doing one of these and you're putting together, say one or two pads worth in here. Save the back of this sketch watercolor pad, save the back of that to be your hard cover. If you're using the Cd paper, like I did on that particular book, those are just paper pad. There's no covers on them. You might want some bookboard or some cardboard. These are chipboard sheets that I've ordered, I think they're 11 by 17 or the same size as that craft paper that I've gotten too. So this is nice because now I can cut this and half if I'm making a journal with this size paper, you know, basically. You know, I already know that I can do half and half. This is going to be my cover. This is the right size for the cover. And on my books, I have a soft spine because that was easy and sturdy enough for what I want to do. That's a very soft spine that I have just glued paper to the binding. We could make a hard spine if we wanted because this would actually cut just a tiny bit in there and give me a spine and the pages possibly, or I could cut it in half. I don't know, we're just going to have to figure that as we're going how we want our spine to be then if we'll have to cut an extra strip or if that would work. I don't know, we'll just have to play and figure it out as we're making stuff. Then the other thing that you could consider is if you're making some watercolor books out of your favorite paper like these, then any watercolor that you happen to have any watercolor pads. This was one pack of the di paper to make this book. This was two pads of the Hamle paper to make this book. It was two of these pads here. I just tore all the sheets out individually and then stacked them all together to create the book. That's two pads of paper, which most of those pads come with what? 12 sheets. It's probably 24 sheets of paper in here. Whatever your favorite paper is, you can do that. I've got a couple pads of cans and heritage that I don't know if they quit making this or not, but I thought, that's a good size and I like that. I pulled those out of my closet to maybe make a sketch book out of So, wow, I know we just talked about a lot of stuff, but the bare minimum that you're going to need is a glue, your little book binding, supplies, maybe a ruler and your papers and whatever you're going to finish the cover with because let me say, let me move a few things over here. Hang on. You could actually for the covers, gather some handmade papers and painted things. Let me show you those in a second, but I just happen to think I did find it handy to have my fiscers cutter, if I was cutting a bunch of pages and I wanted straight edges. That's handy if you've got one, but you don't need it because to cut the ones where I cut the one side off of these, actually used a ruler and my knife and I cut through all the layers. That's one option. I actually have a guillotine cutter also and I found that rather handy to cut the bookboard. If you've got a guillotine cutter, that was convenient for cutting the bookboard. But again, we can just cut the bookboard too with our exacto knife and a ruler, not necessary. If you've got some pieces that you've painted, these would be an excellent way to make a cover. You'd need two different pieces that you painted because when I made this one, I had one piece on the front, one piece on the back and about this much got cut off. But a painted one that you've already used would be an excellent way to cover the front of your book if you want a beautiful book cover and you've already painted a bunch of stuff with some of the videos that I've done, then you could use some of those and you could have something different on the front and the back and maybe a third one as the spine. That could be fun. That could be a good way to use up paintings that you don't plan to frame or do anything else with. You could do something like that. Then the handmade papers, I love. I just had a whole big selection of them. Most of these I got from papers.com. They're just big sheets of different handmade papers, and I just I've had a lot of these for several years, but I thought, this is a good time to use some of that. You can also get big pages of watercolor paper that have a different feel and texture on it than the paper that I'll be using and you can get big sheets of arches, coal press, watercolor paper, hot press watercolor paper, and you can get the great big sheets and you can cut those down to the size book that you're making. I just wanted to remind you all the you got tons of different options there. Another thing I want to show you real quick and then we'll wrap this up. I promise. Is you could have fabric covers, and these I did not make. I actually purchased these quite a while back at the antique market. There was a lady that did little paintings and stuff like this and she made a whole collection of these little book covers with composition books in it. It was nice because she made it to fit the composition book and you could use the book and when you were done with this, you could just put your next book in it. I thought, how clever is that for a beautiful book cover. Now that I'm doing some lovely art journals, how clever would that be to create one of these in the correct size that I could just slip into a beautiful fabric cover. And this is an old drop cloth that she was using to paint on because I actually had seen her in the store when she had put these in. And then she just took that old one layer of painter's drop cloth. And sewed a couple strips of fabric on here, and then flipped it over and one sew line on top and the bottom for the flap, and that was it and it's done. You can see how beautiful these are. For something like this, I thought if you're a sewer, and then there's a little piece of metal that she's sewn on this one, and some buttons and ribbon that she's sewn on this one. But you can see how cheap and easy that could be. If you've got some drop cloth or you want to paint and use drop cloth and then make some of these, there's not even an edge stitching on one end, that was the edge of the canvas, and this one she did put an edge on. So just depends on if you've got a raw edge that will fray, or you could use something like fray check or maybe even mat medium on the edge and just glue the edge so that When you're done, it won't fray because there's no edge. I could fray that if I wanted to, but it feels like it's got some glue on it. You glue the edge. Super easy, you make it the right size, maybe decorate it. I like the paint details on this. Those would be a beautiful mixed media or junk journal or some type of cover for your piece. I'm going to be reusing this because I took the composition book out of it to cut my papers. And I'm going to cut a few more papers and show you how we do that in class and I'm going to maybe cut those other papers. Maybe this will be my inspiration journal that I use these covers on. I don't know. Just giving you some ideas out there. That is a really cool way to make a cover if you wanted to keep using the cover. I hope you enjoyed all of this. You just need some paper, a book binding kid, a ruler, a knife, and some glue would be your basics, pick your favorite paper, and then we will make some journals in class today. 5. Perfect Binding - Glue Binding Book: Thought that we would start off and I would show you how easy it is to make one of these journals with the hand bound cover in the glued perfect binding that lays flat. I've made this book in a couple of sizes. I've got a larger Hamal nine by 12 paper in coal press watercolor paper. This book was this eight by eight handmade cotton watercolor paper. It's different papers, different sizes, this had the yummy decled edge. This has the complete flat edge and it lays flat and we will be able to paint two pages. These are meant for mostly flat types of materials. I've covered these in handmade papers, but you could also cover them in your paintings. Those are made for things where you're going to paint, draw, sketch, anything that's not going to create a lot of height because those glue bindings are not going to hold up to that height. This is an eight by eight pack of 20 papers, and that will give you 40 sides, give or take, because we'll be gluing one of these sides to our book cover, 38 sides, I guess. You see all four edges of this paper have this torn edge on it, which not really good for the book binding, but it's good for the book, all the other edges. I've got a cutting mat down here. I know I didn't mention that in the supplies, but if you have a cutting mat down, that makes it a little easier. You could also put a piece of cardboard down. Basically, what I do is I'm just going to cut off the end edge of this paper so that I have one flat edge and three decled edges. You just need a sharp knife ruler that you can cut up against and you just want to hold it down really well and you want to give your fingers enough space that you're not going to cut your fingers. Be very careful. If it's not perfect, not such a big deal. If you cut it all, it's not perfect, I just don't worry about stuff like that. If you're looking for perfect, then just take your time and be careful and cut all your papers until you've got them all cut. Now, this is where I was saying if you had like a Fiskers paper cutter, you could cut all the pieces individually, but I think it's nice if they're cut together because now you know that they're all going to fit together because they were all cut together. You just do this until you get to the very edge. That book the heavy cardboard that we could use for the cover of the book. We could also cut just like this just working our way down until we have cut that bookboard that we could use for the hard cover. I'm probably going to use the guillotine, but that's how you cut the bookboard also you just cut through different edges. Well, let me just grab that and I'll do it. Hang on. Here's our bookboard which is basically just the cardboard. Just going to very carefully slide that right there. Okay. So it's kind of like it feels exactly like the back of your sketchbook, that back pad of the sketchbook. If you've got a bunch of watercolor pads or sketchbook pads of paper or whatever that you haven't been using or that you've used or you don't mind a sacrificing it, you know, grab that and use that. So I'm making the cover a similar size. You can make the cover slightly larger if you want. But I'm going for a similar size as the papers so that it ends right there with the paper. You can make it slightly larger if you want. There's like 12 million ways to make a book. I'm going to cut one. Let's cut one with the knife. B super careful, don't cut yourself. Cannot emphasize enough. Take your time. Be very careful. There's no hurry here. Do several slices. Okay. And then I can feel there that I've made it to the end. See how easy that is to cut, cut a couple of slices. Again, I will do that here for this side, and I'm just lining it up as best I can. Being very careful keeping the blade away from my hand. I am standing up so that there we go. I am standing up. If you needed a hard cover in between like you don't like the soft cover, we could use this piece, we could do that. I I don't want the hard cover though, but that's a possibility. You've got enough leftover where we could cut a strip and that could be the hard cover and then the other cover here. I want the paper cover personally. That's what I'm going to show you. Just to show you the guiltine Now I can just push this in. I can line that right up with my blade. You have to be real careful because I just cut that crooked. Because I let it slide. You got to hold it down with this piece here. Because I cut it crooked, I'm going to grab one more piece. I like doing stuff like this with you on camera so that you can see that A, you're not the only one that's going to have that problem and B, what could have prevented that? Doesn't even bother me that I might have done that on camera for you. I like making mistakes on camera so that I might prevent you from making that mistake. Okay. So with the guillotine, just like with the fiscer paper cutter, you've got this piece right here that helps you kind of hold it down. And now I've got that lined up. Let's hold the whole thing down so that as the blade comes down, it does not move as it gets further out. Okay. And there we go. Now I can see that I've got a perfect cut and it did not curve out as I got to the other end. Don't forget, if you're using one of these, hold it down by the big piece of plastic. Can you see how easy that is to use a guiltine color. Cut I love my little guillotine cutter. I had one of those in school when I was a kid, it was the old timey one that basically had no safety things on it. I wonder how it is that we all made it ro here's a little tiny piece that could be our spine. I wonder how we all made it through without cutting our fingers off. What the heck. All right. Now I've got my paper. I'm ready to bind this part and glue this part, if you've got any edges that are way off or if you've got something that's uneven. Now is the time to fix that, you want to then tap it out as flat as you can. We're going to save these for a bit. I just wanted you to be able to see how I did that. I'm going to grab a few books and I'll be right back. You might wonder why I grabbed some books, but I want to be able to show you this pretty easily where it's lifted up. But I want to make sure everything's flat and then the books are going to be my pressure on the spine so that it doesn't move while I glue it. That's why I wanted some books. I'm going to have that is the pressure for a little bit because I'm going to glue it. I'm going to wait about a half an hour. I'm going to glue it again. You need a paint brush that is basically one that you don't mind getting dirty getting glue on or ruining. Cheap paint brush that you don't mind ruining. Then I'm going to go ahead and get glue on the brush. I am going to glue the edge of the book super thoroughly, super thick. You want a lot of glue on the edge. For the most part, I do want it nice and thick and tight. Hence the books. If you're using this handmade paper, it's not completely flat, but that's okay. I've still had excellent luck with that. I didn't matter that it was perfectly flat. It didn't matter if there was a wave in here because once it dries, it's fine. And then you can set some weights on it overnight to even flatten it out more, but man, I had great luck. Then one super heavy layer of glue, we're going to let that dry. Some things say, Oh, let it dry overnight. I've got some baby wipes here, and the baby wipes are going to be good for just cleaning up any glue, maybe getting it off the top and the bottom, so there's not any thick glue beads that sunk underneath. And then wait I'd say about half an hour because I made a book. I started the edge, then I went to make the next book and then painted that edge, and then I went back to this book and added a second layer and then a third layer, and then a fourth layer. Then I was happy with that. Three to four layers of the glue, letting them dry about a half hour in between, then you'll let that dry overnight basically. Then once we have got all of these layers dry, we're going to make the cover. I'll be right back. All right. Now my glue has dried on the piece that we just glued the binding. It's a tacky glue, so it does say a tiny bit like tax. Don't assume that's not dry the next day. I see you can see how we can open it flat and we're now ready to do the binding. I've actually let that dry overnight because I had some other stuff to do. But if you'll let that dry just for 30 or 40 minutes, you're probably good to go. You don't have to let it dry overnight. Just when you get the cover on it, then let the whole thing dry overnight. Basically all I'm going to do on this stage, I've got one of these handmade papers because I think it's pretty and you could use a piece of art if you wanted to use a piece of art instead. We could use a piece of art on this, but I already did the bookboards and I want to show you how to do those. Don't change my mind. Let's go ahead with what we got. I got a pair of scissors and I'm just going to roughly cut this page a little bigger than this piece than piece of cardboard. Because basically what I want is to have about an inch all the way around. And so Just enough to wrap it doesn't have to be perfectly straight. You're not going to see the inside when we're done. So a piece big enough to wrap all around about an inch. I'm going to grab this piece here also. And I don't think that's enough. I'm just going to leave that on there. I don't think that's enough to wrap the binding. So I'm going to grab another piece and make sure I've just got something long enough. Because I'm going to wrap the edge of the book. This is how I'm going to cover the edge. If you wanted to be a hard edge, you could have not cut that paper, and you could have had a little piece of edge in the middle. There's lots of different ways to make your cover. This is just the way I chose to make these because that's a great edge on that and I like it. Now, move some of this out of the way. Well, I need this actually. I'm going to make this Okay. Actually, I'm going to glue it first, and then I'm going to cut the edges and then we're going to fold this over and that's going to make our book for us. Let me scoot this side of the way. What I'm going to do is make sure which side I want to be on the outside. I like the shiny thread on this. I'm going to go ahead and let that be the outside. Okay. I need a desk that's like five feet bigger than what I got. I need it to be a gigantic desk. Basically you can use a glue stick for this too. But I'm just using that PVA glue and getting it mostly on here. Not so thick that I that I can't operate with it but thick enough. Then I basically want a piece of card, something stiff. Does an old sticker, that would even be fine. Just really just something that you could just smooth this out. Then I'm just going to flip this over. I will start to curl if you're not quick about this, but just flip it over. I could flip this over and make sure everything smooth, no glue bubbles. You see why if you will smooth that out, you won't end up with great big giant glue bubbles. This handmade paper is a little than copy paper or whatever. Then I'm going to cut the edges, and I'm going to cut it at a little shape, but I want more paper, like I say, a millimeter or two left outside that piece of cardboard. You don't want to cut it up to the cardboard. You want a little bit of there so that it covers the cardboard when we turn this edge. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get it cut. Then this is where I like to use a glue stick. We could have used a glue stick on the whole other side too, but the glue goes pretty fast, and then I'm just going to firmly pull that over, and then I'm going to go to the other edge and just work opposites. You put a piece of deli paper down under this if you're going to be messy and glue your desk, which I happen to have right here, so I could have definitely laid that down, and then I'll keep your desk clean from glue. And then just like wrapping a present, I'm just going to come and wrap this over. Then you see how we just have a nice little edge there on our cover there at the edges. And we could use our bone folder. To really help us get those nice and firm. If you've got any scraggly pieces, you can just trim that off with a pair of scissors. But this is the best way to get a nice edge is to use that little bone folder. Then you'll notice because it's glue and it's on cardboard, it will start to buckle a little bit like curve. But we're going to once we attach this to the book, we'll stack a bunch of books on it overnight and then we will not have that problem, perfect. Let's put some glue down on this one and glue this one. Then again, an old card, like an old gift card, that's perfect for an old gift card, spread this out, so it's mostly flat. I don't want those ridges of glue underneath. I get the edges there and then I'm going to flip this over. Okay. I'll come back in just a second, but I'm going to go ahead and cut our little corner off at just a slight angle just enough so that it's not giving us a bulky edge when we're gluing it. But right up on top of the cardboard, leave a millimeter showing so that it covers the edge. Okay. And then I am ready for a little bit of glue stick. Okay. And again, I work opposites that will help pull the paper from the same direction instead of yanking it from a different direction by going on the other side, just in case I don't want to pull it off center for any reason. By doing this, going back and forth with the different edges, you'll keep it from pulling it off center. Okay. Mages aren't straight, but you're not going to see them. It does not matter if the inside is perfect. Don't get hung up on it being perfectly straight there. Does not matter. We're not going to see it. Again, the bone folder perfect for making sure that we've got no air bubbles that it's nice and flat. Grab our book. Okay. And it's not perfectly square now because I cut an edge off, so we need to make sure that you know, we put it the correct direction, and we'll be able to see how if you put it the wrong way, it's not big enough, it's because it's no longer square. What I'm going to do is now this is the way that's going to go. I'm going to create the spine first and it's just my preference to do it this way. You can definitely look up all the other different ways to make a spine. I'm just going to create the way that I did the other. Basically, what I want to do is have this flip over so it's extra thick at the top. I want to do that, so that's pretty straight. And then I want to have enough left over at the bottom that I can flip it up and I want it to be the same height as the book. I don't want it to be short, really. I'm just going to judge here from the side, did I get the right size? That looks pretty good. Then what I'm going to do is glue the two flaps down because that way they don't move on me. You see why glue stick is. An acid free archival glues stick. Okay. Now, what I'm going to do is put glue on the entire thing, and then I'm going to glue this to the book. I'm going to glue it and let it wrap and that's going to be the spine. I want to piece of paper that's not quite there we go. I'm going to go ahead and glue stick this because you're not going to see it, so don't worry about if these edges are straight, you just want it to be straight on the end so that it doesn't come out weirdly outside the book. And just a nice coat. Then I'm going to judge the center right there. I've got it in the center and I've just pressed down a little with my hands. Then I'm just going to pull that tight around the edge and then secure that right here. Now I am ready to attach my cover. Okay. So that's the right direction right there. Going to use my PVA glue, and I'm attaching this cover to the very first page. In the book. I'm going to grab another piece of deli paper. This is one, I just have sitting over here to the side that I use for protecting pages. I'm just going to protect that just in case. But you can see, that's the first page of watercolor. That's going to be the inside of my flap. When I open the book, it's all going to open like that. That's what's going to attach my flap to this page. Did I turn it? Yes, I did. More of the my PVA glue. Just get quite a bit of that on here. And you definitely want it to be out to the edges, but I'm going to use my spreader to get it closer out there. This is just a piece of paper folded in half. I thought that'd be easier than the sticker I was trying to use. Okay. And this dries clear, don't worry if you have any glue that ends up where you didn't intend it. You can take a baby wipe and wipe it, and then you will have that glue dry clear. You won't even see it. But I do want to get it close to the edges as I can. Then we will glue this down. So I'm just judging, did I get it at the top? Did I get it completely on this sheet? Yes, I dude. Then I could pick it up and look, did I get it in the right place? And I can see here with my edge, I've got a little bit of the edge showing. So because the papers not even, and I knew this. Where's my bone folder. Okay. But again, that glue will dry clear, so I'm okay with that. I'm just pressing that page down to make sure that it's good and down. Then if you've got any on there that you're just not wanting the extra glue there, you can just take the baby wipe and get that a little bit thinner because it'll dry clear. You're not even going to see it. There we go. There's our inside cover, and now we are ready to do the back cover, so let's just flip it over. The papers are different sizes. It's not a big deal if the cover is exact. What I could do is glue the paper and stick the book to it. That could be another choice. Let's just do that and see if you like that better. It's all about experimenting. There's 1 million different ways to make a book. The goal in the end is just to have it with a cover and some pages that you can actually create on. I'd say there's a lot of people that might be really particular. I'm less particular and as long as I can get it to create a book that I'm proud of that I love, you don't have to be precise I do like precise, but I'm just saying it doesn't have to there's no wrong way on some of this. That's what I'm trying to say. There's preferred methods and there's methods everybody teaches. But as long as your book in the end attaches and has a cover and you can use it, success. I want to keep using this. I'm going to wipe some of this glue off. That's a perfect little sheet. Which is the right way nope it's this way. Again, I'm just trying to get a level, get it straight. There we go. Excellent. I can see it goes to the top there. Make sure I got no glue hanging out. I could open it up and use the bone folder, but I'm pretty satisfied that we have attached that and of course, got a little glue there. There we go. Now we've got our book, what I'm going to do is just set this under a stack of books overnight so that glue that still drying isn't tempted to curl. Because you can see as we've had this laying on the other side, it's nice and flat. As the glue dries, you want to just let that give it a chance to set up and not curl overnight. We're just set that how pretty the spine looks when you do it that way and having it pressed under something hard, we'll keep all of that nice and tight. How beautiful and easy is that? And you can make them different sizes. This is the other eight by eight that I made. Then this is the larger nine by 12 one that I made with this exact same method. Now we have a whole variety of books. While you're bookmaking, if you're thinking, I might like to have a couple of the books for uses I'm going forward, you might as well go ahead and make two or three of these if you're thinking I'm going to love these because of how beautiful they are and they'll sit on your bookcase and they'll be nice and beautiful. Then you don't have to buy sketch books and they can have your preferred paper in them that you're going to love. So hope you love trying out the glued binding. This is perfect if you're going to be doing any of the flat mediums, and I will see you back in class. 6. Sewing Signatures - Watercolor Book: This video, I'm going to show you how we do a son in binding, which is the binding that's in my inspiration mixed media journal that the whole purpose for making this workshop was to make something in this style or the size. Something that we could all paint in and have some fun in. Even though we can no longer get this journal. I want to get some more options for art journals and that we can make ourselves. It'd be similar to this, so you can follow along with some of the fun videos that I've been making. So in this book, my very favorite pages are the watercolor pages. And for the first son book and we'll do mixed pages in the next video. So for the first son book, I want to do just the watercolor pages. I've got one of these that I've made, and I'm going to show you how I made this and I made this with a watercolor cover so that the cover could be painted and decorated and it was so easy that you just needed one pack of the di paper to make this exact book. You can make any watercolor paper book in the exact same way. If you like the arches paper or you like the anson paper or you like whatever watercolor paper that you're used to working on, you can do the exact thing that I'm doing. The reason I like the CTI paper is because it's a fantastic side, Fantastic size for the largest paper pad that I'm using. Let me just grab that. This one here, this A three, this is a fantastic size, and it is about 12 " by 16 ", 16.5, give or take. That folds in half to this size, which is approximately 12 " because we use that height, but we fold it in half. It's about 8.5 " by 12 ", which is a fantastic working size for a journal, and it is slightly smaller than the big journal I've been working in, but it's still if I line that up, it's about inch and a half smaller on the top and the side, it's still very large and a fantastic size. We've got three signatures in here. I'm going to show you how I made this book with just watercolor papers, and then it is ready to paint in, and then I love it. Because I showed you these fabric covers that were basically a piece of fabric. The length that we need it plus an extra like three or 4 " plus on the top and the bottom about a half an inch, and then these were just sewn to make a lip. I'm going to these were made for the size of a composition notebook, give or take a half an inch or so, it could be slightly bigger but not much. It was made for this size book, I'm going to cut papers down to this size, and I'm going to make a full book with the watercolor cover. But with the option of slipping it into these fabric covers that I already have. These are just made with an old drop cloth that has been well used. You can see they've got some holes in them. They've got paint all over them, so it's like a painter's drop cloth. Then just some pieces sewn on the front, and that's just a little piece of decoration sewn on there, and then this one, same thing that drop cloth with the little half inch on the top and the bottom where it's sewn, I've got a little lip sewn in. I mean, it's crazy, simple, the way the cover is made just with the lip over. Then this one has the extra benefit of some lace sewn on and just a little decoration. If you like to sew, these are beautiful and not hard to make. But if you're not a sewer, then you might have said, What is she talking about through all of that. But if you're a sewer, that made perfect sense. This is just a cut edge. You don't even have sewn edges there on the inside. If you have that and it's fraying, you can put a little glue there. Or you could sew an edge. This one has the end edge, so it's sewn, but it's probably the end of the drop cloth. But look how easy that was to make to make decide your size, zip fold it over and then just zip zip and you're done. Hello. I'm sure it gets any easier than that. Then just a few pieces of fabric, you could glue those on the top of there, you could sew them on the top, but a little bit of glue would be easy, and then you have a really cool fabric cover. I'm going to make mine This time, because I made this one bigger, I'm going to make this next one just a tad smaller, which means I can't use the full sheets. For this one, I use the full sheets of paper, and then of course, just folded it in half for the registers for the signatures, registers. Folded it in half to make the signatures and there was really no cutting involved. I used it's 20 sheets. I used 18 sheets for the inside papers, and I saved two sheets for the cover. I'm going to do the same thing, but I'm going to trim these down to this size. I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that because these have the lovely decled edges. I think that makes it super cool for an art book to have those hand torn edges. You can hand tear the edges of any paper if you don't start with this paper and you like that look if you're using say Arches paper, you could get a big piece of paper and hand tear all the sheets to the right size. That would be fine. I'm just going to show you how I'm going to size this out and then we will get started assembling it. I've just come over here to my big table where I can measure these out and cut it up. I'm working with the full size sheet of the paper from that pad of paper, and I'm using the composition book that's inside that cover of that fabric piece. I'm making it where I can slip this in and I'm just marking the size that I want to cut these papers to then moving that out of the way. Now I've got several pieces of paper with the pencil mark on it of how I want to trim these down. You can do this with a ruler which a big ruler. I like this one because it's got a hand grip on it. I just got it at the art store yesterday, so you can do this with a ruler, but it won't be the exact edge. Basically, you hold it down very tight, stand up putting your weight on it, and then you tear the paper towards the ruler and that will give you a torn edge. But it won't be the same torn edge as using the rip ruler. This is my dual edge ripper. It is my favorite rip ruler. There are some smaller metal rip rulers, which I have also. They don't quite give you the same edge as this big piece of acrylic does, and they're sharp and they're dangerous. I'm almost afraid of them because I'm thinking, I'm going to cut my hand with this ruler, you got to be careful. But you see how easy that was to tear that. Now my goal here is not perfection. If I get the pages, slightly off. It's not ruined. I don't mind. I've already started a little stack of these and so I'm just stacking them up as I go. Because the edges are like hand torn and not perfect, it works out good if when you're done, you didn't get complete perfection. It's just fine. It's an art book. You're going to be painting in it and decorating it. If it's already not perfect when you're starting, then you might be less afraid of it when you get to the painting part. Okay. Because I know that sounds funny, but we all have that white page paralysis and you're thinking, I don't want to mess this up. If we go ahead and it's not perfect to begin with, maybe we're less afraid of tearing it up. You want to hold this ruler tight all the way to the edge because if you don't, you'll tear it at an angle that you didn't intend and then there we go. I'm going to go ahead and tear all of these, and then we will address the cover in a moment. But you can see how easy this is. Just mark the size you want and then get to ripping. And what I like about the dual edge ripper is it's two feet long. It's big enough for any piece of paper that I might want to work with in this method. I love that. Okay. So we have now cut all of these pieces. Now you're going to end up with a bunch of scraps. What do you do with those? You can save them for mark making, you can save them to test out colors on. You can save them for little bookmarks and paint on them. There's lots of things that you could do with these. That's enough paper not to throw it out. I'm just going to throw it on the floor, so it's out of my way for the moment. Then for the cover, I know on these pieces of paper, I'm going to be. I need to cut two more now that I've done that. I know that I'm going for this basic size, so I'm going to cut it in half, but I'm going to cut it in half by tearing it probably because I want all the edges to be that torn edge, not a cut edge. And when I say it's okay if it's not perfect when you get these torn, this paper is not perfectly straight on every single sheet either, I've noticed. So just don't worry about whether I got it. Perfect perfect as if I were doing pads of paper, which we know are nice and straight. Let's go ahead and tear the last two Okay. Actually, I might not even needed to tear this one, but that's okay. So what I'm thinking? I'm thinking on one of these, we're going to cut this in half and that's going to be the cover. I'm folding it in half so that I have an edge here to cut. I know exactly where that's going to be. This book, it's not necessarily the cover on this is the same size as the paper. I'm not trying to make the cover overlap the paper in any way really. I actually have quite a big size piece right here because I was thinking on this one, Okay. What I would do. Let me just tear this edge so it's torn is create the cover with all watercolor paper like I did on that last one. Let me get that right size there. Okay. All I did. Sorry, I don't mean to move the camera on you there. All I did was this was the spine and then the pieces came in like this. But I did the cover last because I want to make sure that I've got this center spine big enough for all the registers that I'm making. I'm going to save one piece out just in case so that I have an even number that I've torn. We're going to hold this right here and come back to it. Let's go sew our signatures. If I mistakenly say registers in here, for some reason, I have register on the mine. Just know every time I say that I mean signature. We're going to sew our signatures. I need a bone folder for that. I'm going to move these over to the table and I'll be right back. This is the book that we'll be making. You can see I've got the little watercolor edge here and then the page. That's the book cover that we're going to be making in a bit. Which is right here. That's why I have these three pieces. That's how I made this cover. This is super sturdy. This is almost as good as a hard cover. Super duper sturdy because this paper is super sturdy. This was super easy. You just needed one pack of paper, and then your little book binding kit and your glue and you're basically set. Nice, easy, the paper that we love, and then we can paint big double spreads. So this is what we'll be making. Here's my cover. I'm going to set it to the side for a moment, and then we have our pages. I know that I have 18 pages here. If you end up wanting to use your 19th page, you could, but I know that I've got 18, so I'm going to have six pieces of paper in each section. Okay. And you can decide, you could do four page section, six page sections. You're trying to gauge, is that too much? Is that enough? Is that the right amount? And that's what I made on this one that I was showing you, there's six pages in each section. I thought that's what I'd go with. You'll see different book people do this differently. You'll see them do it page by page or you'll see them do it just like this where it's all in the same fold. The reason I do it all in the same fold is because if you do it page by page, you end up with these not fitting together because they don't all get to the very tip here. Then they they start stepping outside of the fold, which drives me insane. I prefer to fold all the pages at the same time together, and they're going to fit together and that's what they're going to look like, and then you can use your bone folder to really help you get a nice edge. Then that's basically what we're looking for. We want to do that two more times. Telling you after you see how easy it is to make your own art journal and then make art in it, you'll never want to buy one again. Again, just get those folded, good. Then again, I'm not looking for perfection because the edges are already of a fashion. It's fine with me if they don't line up perfectly straight, like a like the edge of a sketchbook, because it's part of the beauty. Let's see. I think I got an extra piece here. One, two, three, four, five, I do somehow have an extra piece. Maybe there was maybe I skipped one. Okay. Well, there's six there. And there's six there. So maybe I had a packet that had extra paper in it. So maybe I had a piece of paper over there on the on the Okay. Yeah, four, five, I must have had a pack with an extra piece of paper in it. That's cool. Not only are they not perfectly aligned and perfectly cut straight. They're also not counting to 20 correctly in the package of paper sometimes. But I want these to all to be the same size. I'm sticking to the six. We'll just use the extra sheet somewhere else. Now I have three registers. This is going to create the size of my book. Now we just need to decide how many stitched lines do we want. I love this great big ruler. I went to the **** Blick yesterday. Look how big these numbers are. I love it. This is 10 ". I ended up making a ten inch tall book. What is this? Ten by we'll say ten b88 by ten is what it is. A little bit smaller than that, but it's close, eight by ten. Now I'm going to mark the center of this. Then we could come Okay at about half of that if we wanted, and then at the end. So why don't we do that? You can it's up for, you know, you don't have to it doesn't have to be perfect. You're not looking for exact, exact, but, you know, something that's going to work out really nicely like that. Then I can just hold my ruler up and mark on these so that it's about the same spot. Then we're going to sew these in order. Don't take these and set them to the side out of order. We want to sew them in order in that way because now if we change the order, we're not going to get might not be straight in the way that we marked it and then it'll be crooked. Okay. Now we've got six sheets, three registers, they're all marked at this point, we want to take our all and you want to be super careful and it's very sharp, you might even save the little piece of plastic covering the needle so that you can store it with the needle. Let me put that where I won't lose it. Now we're going to mark our holes here and I'm going to bend it backwards and do it this way because depending on Okay. How you do your holes. If you just go through this way and through there, it might be in the right place on this side, but in the wrong place on the inside, it might come out to the side. You want to be careful, make sure you've got it how you want it here, and then maybe bend it back a little bit and then go straight and on this side. Because we're going through so many pieces of paper, you may have to look to see that you made it through to that side. I've made it through to that side, and then we're ready to mark the other ones. You can just check where it is and there we go. Again, if it's not perfect perfect, it's not a big deal. It's an art book. You're having fun. Something close is what we're going for. Just be careful that you're not stabbing your hand. I'm making the hole a tiny bit bigger here because I want to be able to find the holes. Okay. There we go. That set has its holes. I've probably just moved to my hair, but they're close. Let's go ahead and mark these other two and put the holes in them, and then we'll be ready to sew these together. Okay. And you can do less paper. If it's easier to do less paper, do less paper, I like the six, and I'm okay with that. Yeah. There we go. Okay. So this was the second one. I'm trying to still keep them in order. Because people do you know, nice th signatures where they are real tight together. I like the bigger signatures because that's how my big artbook is that we're keeping and there we go. All three of those. Then I'm going to get a big needle out. I'm using the little Amazon kit so that you'll see how good it works. I've got a needle with a great big head on it, which is why I wanted bigger holes there. My other needles that I had, they're hiding on here somewhere. The head was a tiny bit smaller, so And then we need our thread. I actually have I went to the book to the art store yesterday and I told you about the bees wax and the linen thread. I just went ahead and got one of those so I can show you what we're going to do if you get the wax and the thread. This is bees wax, like a candle, kind of wax. What it is the linen thread is a nice thinner thread. It's pretty. It's the right color for our book. I like that. In this linen thread, there's 50 yards unwax unbleached. Now if you'd use this just like it is, you're probably going to tear the paper, the thread might the thread might separate. You know, it's just It's just raw. If you bees wax it and basically, that just means pull the thread through the bees wax, like this. Just getting some wax on it so that you're just run it through. What that does is leave some wax on the thread, makes it slip and slide a little easier and it protects the thread and the paper usually when you're using it. I'm going to use the bees wax. We're just going to give that a try. These needles are gigantic, I hope. As far as the length of the thread, and I might wax it again. I'm going to use the length of the thread about the size of my arm because as I'm pulling the thread, I don't want it to be so long that I can't pull it all in one go. Then if we run out of thread, we can just tie one piece of thread to another piece of thread in our book. Then on the end, I'm just going to make a knot and I don't know if you saw how I made that knot. Maybe I'll just cut that off and do it again. I just naturally did it. But basically, all you do is you got two ends and kind of twist it on your finger just like that. Then I just twist it through. Now I've got the edge there. But I want it to be a little bit bigger knot than that. I'm going to make it bigger. Then what I'm going to do is have that knot on the outside. Anything on the outside, we're not really going to see the way that this book is being put together. I want that knot to be big enough not to pull through my holes. I'm going to go in the first hole and you can see the needle came right through it. We're just going to this signature come right through the second hole. You see now we've got a line right here and then just pull that then we come right through the third hole. And that and these needles are the perfect size. Look at that. Let's just going right through with no friction. Come right through and right down. There we go. Then I'm going to go right back on the inside and come through that hole that we just came up from so that we're coming back to the other end. There's that one. And there's that one. Then I'm going to go back through the first hole, move that little knot out of the way, go through the first hole, and then I'm going to come underneath the thread that's there. Then I'm going to come through that loop and make myself just pull that tight, make myself a knot and that's how I'm going to knot that off, and then come back through that hole, and then I can now start the next signature. That didn't stay. It doesn't, it's not a big deal. I can just come back up again. I'm going to double nod it. And then come back out. And then we are ready to start the next signature. You can see that I've got my piece of thread is short. It would have been nicer if that were a little longer, but I'm going to go ahead and come through the next signature and then tie another piece of thread on here. I'm basically going to sit this right on top of here and come through that first hole in that next signature, and I'll be on the inside. Now I'm going this is how we attach the two signatures together. I'm actually going to tie this together to a brand new piece of thread, where is the thread? Here we go. The next book, I'm going to use the already waxed thread to show you the difference in the threads. I like using wax to thread. If you've got it, it's already waxed and lovely. I'll use that on the one where we've got the different papers to show you the difference. I just didn't want to show you your options here. I'm going to go a give myself a nice piece of thread here. Again, about the length of my arm, so I'm not double or triple pulling. And I went ahead and threaded it onto my needle, but I'm going to go ahead and get my bees wax and just wax this and it's just dragging it through the wax, just getting all that set up in there and that's waxing your thread. Because this one's already in here. I'm just going to tie these together. You can do it anyway you want. There's 1 million ways to make a book. Everybody has their own way that they do it. Everybody will tell you to do it one way versus whatever way. The goal is just to get these attached and have it look nice when you're done so that you can paint and decorate and have fun with it. Okay. Okay. And then you go to the next hole to right there. I'm actually going to turn it away so that the one I'm working on is at the bottom here. I'm just going to pull this thread all the way through and now we're going to attach this line to this line. Basically, when on the first one, we're going to come around the thread that's there and then underneath the other side on both sides of the hole. And you're just coming in on one side of the hole out on one side of the hole, and this is attaching the two signatures together. Then we're coming right back into the hole that we just came out of to go to the next piece. So we're just sewing one stack of paper to the next stack of paper. I'm just pulling it tight but not so tight that I'm ripping paper. And then this one comes out. Pull that all the way. Now, on one side of that hole, come out the other side of that hole and make that loop. Then we're going right back into this hole here. And if you're real careful, the hole should be lining up. I don't think I was real careful, but it's not a big deal to me. So if you're real careful, they all line up. So B and then we're going through the next hole. Pull it tight, come around one side of the hole, the other side of the hole, make that loop. And now down through that hole, we just came through. Then in the last hole, and then we'll loop around the one that we can loop around. I'm actually going to loop around it twice because I want to. And then back down into the hole that we just came out of. And then what I'm going to do is one extra lock stitch. No. I'm just looping it twice just for some extra security and then I'm going to come back out that hole because now I'm going to go into the third signature, that first hole. Now we're going to attach this signature to that signature, and I'm going to turn it this way so I can see it for a moment. If you can't find your holes, it might even work for you to pick up each piece and see where that hole is going. Sometimes when the paper is, there we go. We just where it came back out. All right. And then nice and tight, just pull that nice and tight. Then now instead of going around that, like I did on that first one because on the first one, we had a band that we could go around. This one, we don't. I'm just going underneath this piece of thread that's holding the two together. You see that piece. I'm just going to go underneath that. If you have a needle that's partially rounded, that might make this a little easier for you. If you've got big fat fingers, do. Otherwise, you just do the best you can and get it to just loop underneath that. That's how we get that third signature attached and any attached after that. You just loop it under, and then we go right back into the hole that we came out of. That's what we are going to attach. Three, and if you have more than three, four, five, six, however many. Let's see if we can get this to come out. There we go. Again, looping underneath this right here, There we go. Might be easier to come in an angle like I just did, see how that easy was to come underneath there, and then we're going to go right back in that hole. We're going to come out this hole. Okay. Here we go. Making sure everything's nice and tight. And again, underneath the attachment there 1-2. And then right back in that hole. And then out the last hole. Okay. Hang on, my little fingers are losing their grip here. There we go. Of the last hole. And we're going to loop underneath our little piece here. And we'll go back in this hole and then tie it off and make a and then all of our signatures are attached. I'm just going to go underneath it. Then I've got a loop that I've created here. I'm just coming through that loop to make a knot. We could do that again. We could go underneath it, and then right through that loop that we just created and then pull it tight and make a knot. Then we are ready to cut that off. Then in here was a little double piece that I had created when I had tied this together. We could just trim those edges. And then that's a little piece that we could either paint or trim or whatever. That's basically what that's going to look like, and we have our three signatures sewn together. At this point and I can see I got them out of order, but for this book, I'm okay with that. If you get it out of order, don't worry about it. I can see that they're not perfectly lined up by the way that thread is doing. I'm okay with that for what I'm doing. So just know that could happen. Now, generally what you would do is clamp your book to glue this binding, and so I'm going to get some clamps and I will be right back. So there's several different ways that people do binding, but I like this glue method and I didn't do this on this one, just to tell you some differences. What I did on this one was I actually came to these two pieces of paper and I ran a beat of glue down there and I glued the two signatures together basically so that when you opened it up, You got a little bit of an abbreviated page with the thing of glue right there. That's one way to do it. If you don't want to glue the edges like I'm about to do, which actually made a little tiny bit easier because then I could attach the cover a little faster without waiting on a bunch of glue dry time. But that's what I did with this. I just glued the page at the edge of each signature together so that there wasn't a gap where they met. Now, that makes the page even I mean, there's this much that's glued. I made the page smaller than I might have liked. On this one, if you make one and you think, here's what I liked, here's what I didn't like and make tweaks. That's the thing to do. The reason why I did that was because in my original inspiration one, this is made with signatures of different color paper also. But when you got to the page where they meet. You could see that there was a beat of glue right there on that signature that glued those two pages together. I feel like that's what they did here and that was my inspiration for that. On this one, going to do it a little more of a traditional way and run the glue with these clamped together. You want to protect whatever you're clamping with a little piece of wood or maybe some extra pieces of paper. I've got some of those scrap papers that we just did. I've got some clamps from the hardware store that I already had. If you don't have clamps, it's not a big deal, but it does keep it nice and straight for us because I'm sure there's an official book holder or whatever that could do this for us. But because I just make these for my own fun, I'm just going to clamp them with these big clamps I got from the hardware store. Then basically and you want to be careful because you don't want the glue to drip all the way down in between the book pages, but you want to basically take your glue and run a glue edge. But I don't want to go all the way down in the books. I wanted to hang out here on the edge, which is what the clamps hopefully will be doing for us. If we have an PC, then it is what it is. It's not a big deal. I don't want you to do stuff like this and then if it didn't work out exact or perfect or you ended up with something weird, I don't want you to get upset about that. It's not a big deal. It's an art book. It's just paper. It's going to be beautiful when you're done painting and doing stuff like that. You're going to love it. If you've got an PC in there, it's not a big deal. But I am wanting to keep that glue where I'm putting it. Hopefully, that's going to do that for me. And we'll just see I might have an s not going to let that ruin my day. We'll hope it sits where it sits. So now we need to let this dry. Then we can make our cover for it and I've already got our cover pieces that we cut, but I need to let this dry a little bit, so I'll be back. 7. Watercolor Book Cover: All right. I'm ready to add a cover to our first book. I'm just going to take off our clamps. I know I said I was going to let this dry overnight, but I'll be honest, I went to eat lunch and the glue is still white. I did a couple of little things I wanted to do. I came back and the glue is clear. I think the glue is good enough for us to at least finish this book. I can tell I got off on the signatures on this book. If you do that like I did that, I like making mistakes for you so that you can see, it's not a big deal. But now we can see and I'm not going to pull it real tight, but we can see right here we'll have a glue binding in between our pieces here. Now I could paint and do something in between there. I'm not going to pull it tight today because I know it's not 100% dry, but at least I've got something holding that together there. Now I'm going to glue the cover on this book. This is the piece that I'm going to use as the spine for this particular book. I'm just going to make it where I can see where that bend is a little bit and maybe take my ruler and give it a little bit of an edge there. I'm just seeing, do I have it mostly straight and then I'll eyeball it, but I'm just going to give it a little help there. Then on this side, I'm going to do the same thing about there. You could measure it be more exact. I'm not too worried about it. Just going to give that a little fold. Now, see if we got that about the size that we wanted it. Let's just see how now that's perfect. That's exactly what I was thinking. What I'm going to do is actually glue, one cover on here, one cover on the back. Then this is going to be the spine and it's going to make basically just an over cover. That's just the way that I chose to do this one. You can certainly you could glue it underneath it and have it covered that way. That's another way we could do it. It would still look good because I'm actually going to be gluing this page to this page and making it a complete cover. Your choice there if you want that little spine to be on the inside of the outside. I did the other one on the outside. Let me just grab that one. I liked it, which is why I was thinking same thing on this one. But now that I've done on the inside, I might do this one on the inside instead of the outside. This one's got the outside binding part. I think I'll do this one on the inside, now that I've Now that I've looked at that. All I'm going to do basically, I've got just a little piece of paper folded in half making a little protection for the glue protection. Hello. I'm thinking of this, I need some protection for my table. Get my thoughts twisted. It's going to be like a glue spreader because I'm going to put the PVA glue on here because that's the glue I'm using. I'm just going to get it all covered. And then I'm going to use this lovely little paper spreader that I made for myself and just spread these out so that it's all covered, but not getting all over my table and not leaving some gigantic glue lines. There we go. It dries clear. We'll be good. Then I'm just going to center this in here. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're just getting close as good. Because then I'll have the cover on top of that. Just getting that attached a little bit. Then this is going to be my top cover. I am going to glue it also. Okay. And then once we're done, I'll stack a heavy book on top of this and then let that really set up and dry. Just spread that glue around. Just getting as close to the edges as you can without making a gigantic mess. Then we're ready to stick that down. I'm just going to flip it over. I'm actually going to get another piece of this just in case I don't want to glue down to the paper underneath it. My little binding is a tiny bit longer than the cover piece, but I don't even care. It looks all right to me. I'm good with that. I could have I could have shortened it again, but it's all uneven and imperfect, which makes me like it even more, so I'm okay with that little bit doing that. A little bit of glue, get my little spreader. I need another piece of parchment paper. That's just deli paper there that I'm using in between those pages just in case I had any glue spillage that I wasn't seeing. So let me grab a piece of this deli paper. I had some fall on the floor so there we go. And going to open that first page, and I'm just going to set this one up. Get that nice and even and there we go. Now, I am just going to set a heavy book on the top of this. To let it dry overnight, but check it out. Before I set this up for the night to dry. Look how good that looks. Now we've got the edges. Now when I set that up that's why I want to set a heavy book on it to make sure all of these stay down. But it's got a nice edge. It's something that we can decorate on the front and the back. It's got a double flap, which will make our front page, and now we are ready to paint and play in our books. We're going to set a book on this one overnight and then We're going to move on to the other book and finish the cover for that one also. But this is basically finished. After we let this dry overnight, we are ready to paint and add stuff and create yummy art in our watercolor book. I hope you enjoy making one of these. I had to come back with this one after we made our third book because I've been letting it sit for a while so it could set up with the glue. But I didn't test it to see if it fit in my journal. It may not fit into this cover. But it would be really nice if it did because that was my intention. I'm just going to open this up and see if it slips in and if it doesn't, I may have to make myself one like this because I think that might be short. Yes, I'm a tiny bit short. Now I know because I think those are a little bit smaller. Is this one any bigger? Let's see. I think it's the thickness of the spine I didn't count on with the pre made ones. I may make myself a sewn cover because it's just some drop cloth stuff. The thought of this slipping into one of these was just fun. I did like that idea. But I might make myself one with a little extra room for the spine because the spine is thicker on this. Oh, Just thought I would show you all that just in case, but it would be super cool to have one covered in a fabric cover. Now I'm going to have to get out my soil machine and sew myself one of these. Anyway, thought you'd like to see that and just get engaged. I if I were making this myself because I didn't make these myself. I would do like we did on that next books cover where we size everything out from the book we're working on. If I were doing this for myself, I would take the piece of fabric. And then measure it out to the book that I'm using it on and flip it under and make sure that that's going to fit on the page that I want it to fit on and then just zip an edge on the top and the bottom and it would slip right in. I might do that. We'll see. But I think that was interesting. Otherwise, we can just paint this cover with art and decorate it. Now that my little pretty fabric cover did not fit. I thought, let's just make a pretty cover and see how easy it is. Because I really liked this Belgian linen that I had found at The **** Blick might as well use a piece of that. Why not? Let's see which way I need to go. I'm just going to open this up. I'm thinking, you know what? I could just judge it this way, here we go. Let me get my scissors here. Cut this edge, that's the piece I used when I was cutting the papers. I want to give myself a little extra room. I'm actually going to give myself a little extra extra room. Let's just cut it extra big for a moment to get so I could put this piece back over there and it's doubled, so there is two layers here. I'm thinking in my mind and really I could I'm thinking in my mind. We'll go right here. Let's find the front cover. There we go. I can fold this just like that, and then I just need that much over here plus a fold. Okay. So really, if I cut this out right here, I will give myself some to trim. Okay. Now, I got enough to fold right there. That is how we are going to judge that and now I can take some little pins and I can pin that. Then I can I can go this one little flap here with my soul machine or a needle. I could just do a needle and thread really. Then I could glue or let's just do it with a needle and thread. I got thread over here. Let's just take this waxed thread is an awful big needle. I've got smaller needles. I wonder where I hid them from myself. All I'm going to do is just sew that little piece, let me go find a smaller needle and I'll be right back. Oh, here it is. I found it. I just didn't want one so big. I want this little linen thread since I've already got it. You could iron this needs to be ironed, you could iron this first, but I just want to make a cute edge. Of if you had the right color thread, that would be helpful. And I'm just putting an end down here in the end. Well, that's a big dole needle. Hm. Okay. Of course, we could sew this under. I'm sewing it on top, but we could sew it under. We could also come back and decorate the top of this so that any sewing you did gets covered. I could sew the whole thing under an inside. I like the freight edge on the inspiration piece there. I can definitely tell this is a book needle and not a regular needle. It's got a big end. We could come back and glue some lace on this. That would be pretty. Just trying to give you some ideas here and show you how you could easily make a cover like this. Do think that a better needle would have been easier. Yeah, I probably would have been better to get my sewing machine out, but just to give you an idea. Then you could come back with some pinking shears and either pink that edge because now we can cut it to where we need it a little bit longer than we need it and we could decorate the front of the cover and make something similar to that. Because I was measuring this out with the little composition book it came in, I was not figuring on the thickness of what my binder was going to be so Okay. Doing one like that for yourself, I would measure it out around the actual book once you've done creating it, and then you can tack your threads in place and then sew and decorate and have the book cover for the book. I hope that explains how I would compensate for the thicker backing on that and gives you an idea on maybe some fabric covers that you might do for your piece. Let me tell you the genius idea I just thought of as I turned the camera off. Now that I have this piece outside The whole piece with the linen. I could just glue the piece on here that I wanted to be the cover, and then would have a linen binding around it showing outside. How genius is that, so I can still use my piece as I attach the bigger fabric piece around it. I think that's what I'm going to do. Let me sew this on here and I'll be right back. I sewed both of those edges while the book was still in and then I took the book out of it so I could just trim that up to a tighter edge. Now, I'm just going to put the book back in I'm going to literally glue this one on exactly where I want it. Then I still have my cover, and it took very little effort to make that change. I want it to be about the same amount of edge on the front and the back. Where there is a will, there is a way. Then I'm just going to use the tacky glue that I've already got because I don't have the edge out of it. I'm just going to use the glue that I've already been using. I'm just going to glue this cover right on top of this cover because I want to. I love it. If you sew, and you're thinking, I love that. So yourself one and you can add whatever different yummy fabric scraps and stuff that you have. If you don't sew, but you can do a little straight stitch like I just did. That's fun. But you can glue all this. You can make a hard book cover like the hard one that we created and you can decorate the top of it and you can just do the cover with canvas if you want and get the same look. I wanted to use this and make it a little larger and have this be the outside one of my art journals. I had already planned on sacrificing it for this because I'm going to actually paint in this journal and make it a complete and finished journal. This is what I wanted to be on the outside. Now look at there. How can we fix what we had there. Okay. Look at this. This thing says so, SON GER, verb down to dream to muse, to think to reflect to mean intend to devise to propose to propose to consider to cast about for to aim to think deeply. Look at that. That is perfect, isn't it? I'm going to let that dry overnight. Obviously, I'm going to set it under a heavy book. But that's our book. We've got a pretty cover that we did. Okay. And we made it fit when I misjudged the size. So if you misjudge the size, just think, problem solved, how can I fix this? What can I do to make this right? All right. So I hope you enjoyed seeing how I made that right, and I'll see you guys back in class. 8. Mixed Paper Book: I've started over here on my cutting table because now the third book that we're going to make, we've made the glue binding, I've shown you the binding. This third book is going to be a binding, and it is the one directly inspired by our Dana Wakey mixed media journal because this is the one that sold out worldwide. As soon as I started using it, everybody was like, I can't find that book. Now we can just make our own. I'm going to mostly duplicate this book here for our own. I've got the one that I've been working in. This book has watercolor paper in it that I think is very similar to the Cody paper. It may be a different handmade cotton paper, but I'll be using the Cody paper. You can use whatever watercolor paper you like. It also has a burlap paper in it. Then it also has some canvas in it, and then it also has brown craft pages in it. To get as close to this as possible, I'm going to use watercolor paper. I'm going to use Canvas and brown craft paper and some burlap. I had to think for a second. I've got a pad of the watercolor paper because I want it to be as close in size to that without it being a hardship. I'm going to use this paper and that's going to be the size. It is about an inch and a half shorter on length and width, but I'm fine with that. I also have a burlap table runner that I bought for the burlap. I'm going to cut that into pieces that are similar in size to this. I also have raw canvas, so I can use the raw canvas. I went to the **** Blick yesterday and I got a couple of pieces of actual canvas. Let me go grab that. I found at the Blick that you can get cotton duck canvas unprimed, and I also found some Belgian linen unprimed. And even though I got this burlap, it's my least favorite paper to work in in this big journal, and since it's Mast favorite, I could put it in one signature and leave it at that so that it's in there and it gives me that challenge of working on it, but it doesn't have to be my least favorite one in there every time. I like this duck canvas because both sides are this raw canvas. Both sides are just like a nice quality thick like a drop cloth, basically, versus this unstretched canvas roll, which is acrylic prime because this roll has a white side that's acrylic primed and a canvas side. I could use this Sorry, trying not to move the camera on you there on a lightweight little tripod here at my table. I actually think I'm going to use this canvas for this piece, what I'm going to do and I actually really liked this Belgian linen. Maybe for one signature, I might put that burlap in for one search signature, maybe I'll put this linen in for one signature, I might put this canvas in because if I do it I could do three signatures or I could do four. Technically, my inspiration book, has four signatures. I can see one, two, three, four. We might even go for four signatures since I've got so many paper types. I do want to keep it to six pieces of paper per signature. Basically, what I'm going to do is move some of the extra paper out of the way. That was the paper that I cut down, so I'm not going to cut this down, I don't think. I'm going to move a little bit of my mess off the table. Go to open up my paper here. That is the big pack of A three, and you might use all of the pieces and make up that many signatures. I like one, two, three, we could do three watercolor pages, perhaps then I might add another watercolor page. We'll see. Definitely a craft paper page, which you'll notice is similar size but not exact. When I say it's similar size but not exact, it's actually about a half inch longer on this end. And so what we could consider doing is having one torn I like that. What did I do with the rip ruler right here? I could tear one to have a decled edge. I could have one edge straight. That could be one option, or these pages could be slightly shorter, that would be another option. We can just doesn't have to be the same size. We can keep things a little shorter if we wanted. That might be interesting to have different width and depth? We could have this one come in and be super short compared to the outside page just as an interest? Let's do that. Let's just do it. Let's do it. I like it. I like it because it's also shorter on the top and the bottom. I want to account for that. I don't mind that it's completely different. I could also, if you want it to all be exact, you could definitely tear our piece down. I showed you in the last video how we tear that down with the ruler for a different size. But for this, because the heights are also different. I like that it's going to be slightly in. It's a interesting take on that inner piece. So I might have that page in down here. This could be a piece there, and when we go to fold this in half, I'll double check that. Then in this page in between these two pages, I might have a piece of canvas or a piece of linen or a piece of tablecloth te. This really was my least favorite surface to work on in that book, if you're making yourself a new book, just grabbing some scissors here, trying not to move stuff on you. And I'm going to grab my cutting mat also, so I'll be right back. Okay. Okay. I've got everything gathered. I've got a knife and cutting mat over there, but I don't need that for the jute piece, but I'm going to need it for some other stuff. But basically, what I'm going to do here, I've got a saw edge. And so I could either cut the sewn edge off because these pages, they're allowed to fray a little bit in this book and that fray is part of the interest of the book when you see the threads come out. And so all the edges are raw and allowed to fray. So I could let it do that, or I could glue the raw edge so that it doesn't fray, or I could keep one of these edges. All right. I'd let the dog settle down. I'm just eyeballing it, doesn't have to be perfect. Just eyeballing this. And getting it close the pages can fray and they can do what they want to do. I'm just not worried about it being perfect. I don't want you to worry about it being perfect unless you want, spend as much time as you need. But I'm going to go ahead and just get these close, and then some of the edge can fray and I will be happy with whatever that's doing. I'm not worried about it. When we sew it in, I'll just be another interest in what we're creating. And I'm just using the paper underneath as a rough guide. This will probably be the only piece of burlap that I use because that's my least favorite papers in that book. Maybe I just want to have one of that in my book. Well, it's bigger. Hang on. Let me cut it a little further. Yeah, I think I only want one of these pages in my book that I work in next and there we go. That's about the right size. Give or take a tiny bit. Might straighten this edge a tiny bit here. And there we go. Now I've got one page three page four page five page. I really want this to be a six page signature. I'm going to grab one more piece of paper, and that will be my six pages for my first signature. I'm just going to line all these up where I want them. Yeah. And I'm going to go ahead and fold this and make this the signature, and I can get my bone folder and really crease it even better in a bit. But I'm just going to say, there we go. That's number one, and now you can see, we've had six pages, but now we've got double sided. Now we've got double that in the amount of stuff that we have here to work in, so it's really cool seeing the different surfaces. You know what I forgot Canvas. I could have in between this page of canvas, or I could save a canvas piece For one of the further signatures. Let's do that because I'm not going to use that. Watercolor pages are my favorite. It's your prerogative to put whatever your favorite pages are in your book. You don't have to have it exact to what that was. There's one signature. I'm going to set that to the side. Try the next one. I want six pages total, so I'm thinking four watercolor and two other. The other for me, one, two, three, there's four. I do like the craft paper pages. Might go ahead and do another one of those. I already know that I'm going to tear the edge. I'm going to just make that similar to the first one. Okay. And we're going to flip it around and do that again. Again, I'm not getting too exact. I'm just working fast there, basically. Then I'm going to slip this one in down here. The inspiration book actually had lots of different two craft pages together and two canvas pages. They're different in the way that they laid that out. I'm okay with us laying this out, the way that we want to do it. Let's do this. Let's just mark on here. I'm going to leave one freight edge because I like that. Let's just draw this on here because this is the size we're going for. Now I can cut that and this will be our Canvas page. Okay. And again, I'm going to allow this to be raw. I'm going to allow it to be edge that's able to be frayed. So again, I'm not looking for perfection and I want the edges to fray. So I drew that out and now I'm just cutting out exactly what I drew. And the raw edges. I'm going to let them fray and left one fray edge on here because I liked it. Now there is another page in our books. Now I've got Canvas. I'm going to do two watercolor pages. I not Canvas, a craft paper. I want two watercolor pages. I've got a Canvas page, and then I've got page number six. I've got four watercolor pages and two add ball pages is the way I'm setting my next one up. There we go. It's the way I've set the first one up. Now I've got six pages, four watercolor, two other, and the craft paper one is smaller. I'm basically going to fold this in half. Again, do nice little fold there and we can when we get over to the table. Now I've got two signatures with a different surface in it, burlap, and then the second one has our craft paper, and then our odd ball being our Canvas page. I'm loving that. Now I'm going to make two more of these, and then I will meet you at the table with my four signatures ready to bind. Okay. I've made my other two signatures and I actually made them the same because I liked that linen stuff. The Belgian flax, the Belgian linen stuff I showed you. I did a watercolor page. I did a craft paper page on these last two are the same. I did two watercolor pages and then that linen because I love that. That's going to be a replacement surface for me for this burlap stuff. I love it. I love it. I love it and then a watercolor page. There's six pages in this one. I did two of those. I think I'm going to do one at the very back and one at the very front so that you don't see those surfaces too close together. Then I have the one with the canvas, and then I have the one with the burlap, and then this one on the top, and I think that's going to be the order of my signatures. I want to take the bone folder and really really Work these into a nice tighter fold, which it doesn't matter at the moment, the order. I'm just was telling you the order that I am hoping for going forward, but for the moment, I'm going to flatten these a little more. Okay. And they're not going to be perfect. I'm okay if I've got different stepped out links here because I'm using super duper thick papers. This is not a commercial book that we're making. It's a handmade book and the papers are so thick and I guess if you were making a commercial book, maybe you'd have a paper chopper to chop the edges, but I've got hand torn edges. I like that these are not going to be perfectly straight like a commercial book. That's my favorite part about it. Once we've got just a much tighter edge on these. Then we can look at the order. There we go. Now, you know what we might do because I tend to get these out of order. As I'm sewing, we might just write on here the order so that as we grab them, we remember what the order is. I did that in pencil so that could be erased. Then just like in the other book, I'm going to go ahead and do a sod binding because these are so thick. I'm thinking that we'll mark these. This is 12 ". Well, like 11 and seven eighths, but that's okay. I'm going to center it, and then maybe I'll have one of these marks in the center and maybe inch and a half in and then an inch from the end. Let's see, maybe an inch and a half. Let's do that. We've got center in a half inch and a half That wasn't really inch and a half there. Let me. Just looking at that thinking that's not right. Let's do that again. But mark them where you want them. I want one in the center, I want two down here and two up here. However that works out for you. Really, if I did that, I could do at two inch intervals and then with two inch to the end, that would work just fine. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do two inch intervals. There we go. And then try to get it as straight as possible there. And then I'm just going to set my ruler up and go ahead and mark those as we come up. That could have been too, how I got not so straight on that other one. I'm just not worried about it being exact personally. I'm okay with it having that handmade lovely quality about it. I'm just lining the lines up and going for it. Because I mean, what's more fun than making an artbook and then painting in the art book and being like I made the book and all the art. That's amazing. There we go. Think I'm set. Now we're going to take our all and we're going to punch holes and start sewing. I've got little numbers on it, so I know one, two, three, four, five, six, and going to bend it a little bit and come in and mark our holes. I'm going to go in pretty far. I want the hole to be big enough for my needle to get through it and I can check on the side that it's come all the way through. I'm just going to be careful, take your time. Don't get upset, don't get in a rush. If it's a little off here or there, it's a handmade book. That's what gives it its loveliness. Again, we can check and I'm right there where I want to be. Good job. Good job. There's Pairs, number one. And see, I'm already trying to get them out of order, so I'm glad I put my mark on here. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and punch the other three. Again, check on the bike. We come out at the center. And I've picked out the papers that I want to use, but you'll feel free to get creative and use the papers that you want to use. I'm trying to duplicate as I can. The book, the Dana Wakey one, but still change it a tiny bit to more match the way that I like to work and the services that I've decided I like or don't like. So definitely if you think I don't like the burlap, feel free to leave the burlap out of your book. I didn't love the burlap, but I would say I liked it. I have a burlap in the book, but I only have One of them. I don't have it every other page in my book. There's number three. See, number in them. That's the way to do it. Stick a number on there because we would have totally been out of order by now because talking and filming and cutting and making all at the same time. You just get to where you're like, I don't know what I put where. Then once we've got all our holes, we are ready to sew this together. I'm going to do this just like we did the watercolor book. I'm going to sew these four together, and then we're going to glue the little edge. And then we'll be ready to make a cover and I thought for this because we made a soft cover on the other one. I thought we'd make a hard cover for this one. There's number four. I'm going to use the already waxed thread that came in the $7 Amazon kit because I like wax thread, and I've got several colors, but I've never used this one and this one feels a little thinner than the three pack of threads that I personally already have. Again, I'm just going to double this and I'm going to make it about the length of my arm doubled because that's how far I can pull out the thread as I'm sewing. Then I'm going to double knot this. Again, I'm just going to twist it around my finger and then I'm just going to roll it off my finger so that I get that right there and then pull it and that gives me a nice knot. Okay. Now, let's go to number one. I'm going to start this on the outside at the bottom. Then if you need to because it's so thick, if you need to look in between each page as you're sewing, go for it. Then I'm just going to pull this until it's tight and that knot is there at the end. Then I'm going to go right into the next hole. Again, if we need to look in here to find the hole and that's fine. The paper is so thick it just your needle might not go the same way that you originally thought it should. Again, just pull that so that it's tight but don't keep pulling it. You don't want to pull this through and you don't want to rip your paper. Let's see. There we go. So I'm just going to pull it all the way. We're going to go one edge, and then we're going to go we're going to sew it back the other way. So that's where we're going with this. The first one always has a little extra round of threads going. I can see here actually on the outside. I've got one thread that didn't pull the same. There we go. Almost might be easier if you hold it straight and then push it through the hole and then check and see did you get all the way through? You might not, but it's almost easier to find the hole doing that than it is. Open it up and doing it. There we go. There we go. We've got one round straight down in, in, and now I'm just going to come back through the hole right here. And go back up. You can see it's going to create a nice solid thread line here going back and forth like this. I'm going to give us a nice start here, right there through the hole. Then right through this hole. There we go. Just pulling that tight as we're going. Then I'm right back here and I'm going to come through the first hole again, pull my knot over to the side. I'm just going to loop around and make a knot on the inside. I basically did that by looping under and then pulling this through the loop that I just created and then pulling it tight to the end. Then we're going to pull through that original hole and go back to the outside. Okay. And then I'm going to pull it tight enough where it just pulls that real tight and if you pull that knot through to the front side, that's fine too. That might be preferred. But what I've done is I've made it so big and this thread is so big that I'm just pulling it tight. It may or may not pull through to the front, but I'm good either way. And then I'm ready to attach number two. Because I have these numbered, now I'll know how not to get out of order. Number two, I'm going to continue on with this piece of thread, and we can trim this at the end. I'm not worried about that piece there, don't worry about it. I'm going to come back through number two till I get to the center. There we go. Then I'm going to come through this one here. This is attaching both of these together when we sew it this way. Let me find the holes. Okay. All right. There we go all the way back out. There we go. Then I want to pull that pretty tight. I want that to be nice and firm. I'm going to pull it up here and pull it where this pulls a little tighter than that. I don't want that to be loose like that. I'm going to pull that one inside that. Then I can pull. There we go. Now we've got two that are together. Then I'm going to take this piece of thread through one of the threads on this side of this hole on the first one and then back through the other side of the thread on that first one. Now we are attached to signature one by both of those. Then I'm going to go back down through that hole that we just came through and loop around and come back through this hole and we're going to do that again. Let's go back through the hole that we just came out of There we go. And then that locks number two to number one. And I want it to be tight, but I don't want it to be so tight that it jerks funny. Then again, back through that hole right there. Good. Then I'm going to go on one side of the hole on signature one and come back through the side of that hole and get that locked onto it, and then back down through the hole, we just came through. Then I can see here I've got a loose thread that it didn't pull all the way the way I wanted it. I'm going to actually try to pull that through before I get too far. Let's see what which one that was. Okay. There we go. Just take a moment and if it takes a minute to untangle them. Not a big deal. Take that moment if you see a loop and get that loop pulled back out. It might take you a second, but that's okay. But I don't want to leave any loops like that personally. If you end up with a loop at the end, then you're like, how do I end up with that loop then collage on top of it and you'll never see it. Just don't let that stop you. You haven't ruined your book. There's always ways to change and fix stuff. There we go back up through this hole. And you might just check as you're going that you don't have any weird loops inside that you pulled S, I do have a loop in there. I pulled. Now I'm glad I looked and go ahead and pull the loops out as you're going. Then just like we did a minute ago through this loop on the left side and through the loop on the right side, and then we've made ourself and attached the loop here. I don't know why this wants to make a little loops on me here, but just be careful to pull all the little loops out. Here we go. Then back through the hole, we just came in. And through the top one. Let me see where this is going here. There we go. Just take your time getting these two line up and loop through, make sure we've still got a tight loop on that side, and then out the last hole here. I to the hole here inside the book. Then we may have to just look, there we go. Make sure we didn't make a loop on the inside real quick, pull it tight. Then on this last one, I'm going to double loop it around right here just to really get that attached. Actually, I could pull it right through there and kind of make a not out of that. Okay. Here we go. Now, I've still got thread on here. I'm ready to pull the third one. What do I have here now that I've gone back and forth. I've got number one. Excellent. Number two. Now, see how you can get turned around on these. Now I've got the number three down here in the corner and I'm ready to start sewing in number three. D definitely mark those on the front. That has made this a little easier on this one. Now I'm ready to come through the third one and we're ready to attach the next one. Let's go ahead th find the center here. Okay. If you're wondering how you get off on your holes, we're using thick paper and we're going through a curve. This is why it might be easier to look in between each and find the center hole. Now we've got started and we are going to come back through. And find our way to the outside. There we go, and we're going to pull that tight and we're going to make sure there's no loops on the inside. Then we're going to do a little bit different on this one because now we can just go through the loop that's right there that we just created with those two. We're not trying to go around the left and right side of a thread because we didn't make that thread, on the second one, we go through the little loop that we've created there. Then that's attaching number two and number three, and that's how we're going to attach all the ones after that. We're going to sew it and then go through the thread. Now I'm just going to go back through the hole that we just came through. Going to pull it tight but not so tight that I'm ripping my book hopefully because you can found it. Come right through, make sure there's no loop in there. Then come here on your book and just loop through the two that are there. You see how if you anchor it on one side instead of try to go down in the middle, it allowed me to grab the needle. Okay. So we're going to pull that and we're going to go right back into the hole that we just came out of. I'm almost out of thread. I've got one or two more. We're going to tie another piece of thread on here. I'm not worried about thread, but I want to tie this one on the outside. The other one I did a tied on the inside and I should have tied it on the outside. Then come back through into the next hole that we created, who found it. Then again, we're going to go through the little hole that we found there and pull it in, and then go right back into the hole that we created. But because I'm almost out of thread, I might could finish one more, but I want to continue this into a fourth signature. I'm going to go ahead and tie a new piece of thread onto here. I'm going to leave enough for that thread there. If we tie it on the outside when we put the cover on it, and we put the cover on it, then it's hidden. You never see it. Again, I've got enough thread to be about the length of my arm. Okay. Then I'm just going to tie these two together rather than not this. I'm going to tie these two together and let let it do its thing. Here we go. I've just double noted and I can just trim off the extra if I need to. It's going to be glued into the middle of the cover. However you like to do a no? Go back through the hole that we just came through. I got off track there in my thoughts. Oh, no, sorry, we're backwards. I want to go back into the hole that I came out of on signature number three. There we go. There we go, coming back through that hole because I've got such a long thread, I want to make sure that I don't leave a loop in here, and I don't want to pull the knotted piece. I don't want to pull the leg of the knotted piece in the wrong spot. There we go. It's nice and tight still. Now, we're going to come through the fourth one. Okay. Sorry, if you hear a little puppy dog fan in the background, it is terrible tornado weather outside. Through the fourth hole's thundering and if they hear a big boom, they're like, and they get excited, not excited, good, though, but upset. That was a big boom a bit ago though Holy Moly. Totally lost my train of thought it was such a big boom. Again, loop up here and get that loop there on that signature, and then I'm going to come back and tie it off. Okay. Give myself a knot here. So it's nice and tight, and then I'm going to come back through and start the fourth signature. Find my hole here. Okay. Now we're ready to attach number four. So if I still got them in order, one, two, three, yes, I do. Number four. Now we are to attach the last one. See where the center is here. There we go. There we go. This is going to be our last signature in the set. Now we're going to come back through to this side. Because we have an extra signature here that we didn't do on the other one. We're again coming and looping, but we're looping number two and number three instead of looping number one and number two, like we did, and then just pull that nice and and then go back through that hole to the center. Let's find the center. There we go. Come back through the center, and now we're ready to go right through the next hole. There we go. Pull that tight. We might look at the center section and make sure we don't have a weird loop. Nope. Then we're going through underneath this loop here 2-3. Again, if you come through here and go this way, you give yourself room to push that needle rather than trying to sneak in between the two with your fingers. Then back to the center of this one. Where is. There we go. Let's go through the center. There we go. And these go pretty fast. I know it's going slower as I'm explaining it, but I made one morning. I made like five different artbooksthugh the center. Of two and three, a loop there. I made like five books one morning. I mean, you could make a bunch at one time and then not make anymore for a while if you wanted. Let me tell you if you wanted to do an EC store making handmade journals, you could probably make bank because there's a lot of people that think, Oh, this is so hard, I don't want to do it, or I just want to buy one instead of do all that work. You might have a little side hustle there. All right. Here we go. Let's just make sure that we've got that with no loop in it, like no extra hanging out, and then here we go. Through that loop on that one there. Then I'm going to come back through the center and tie myself a knot to get this tied off. B through here and kind firm it up. What have we got going on here? I've looped out somehow. Oh, I got a little not made. Yeah, be careful that you don't have some weird noted loop hangout because the thread will catch on itself basically. So just create a little not there for myself. I'm just going to pull this back through so that I can not it off on the outside and then we'll be done and secure. There we go. Where is the whole there we go. All right. There we go. This one wants to tangle on me. Make sure I got that. Yes. And then I'm going to knock this off on the outside and we will be done. I'm just going to go underneath it, make that loop, and then I'm going to go through that loop with my needle to make a knot. And then I'm going to do that again to make a double knot, and then we can be done with our four signatures. So I can just cut that off. Then just like the other one, we could glue that with some glues. I'm going to see if I can find two more clamps. I really want those big clamps that I used on the other one, but it's still drying. You could also clamp it down in between books and then glue the spine that way. You can also not glue the spine But the thing with these big books is I don't want there to be a gap. When you're using the book and you get to this page between the signatures, I don't want that gap. I want that to be glued paper and then us create a cover for that. So I'm going to go and maybe do the book method just to give you another option. Let me go grab some books and I'll be right back. Okay. So I've set the books. Up a little where we could see it and it's not as tight as it could be if we clamp clamped it really hard, but it's good enough. I've just gotten several heavy books to go on top of it and we're going to we're glue, going to let that sit and it's just going to be good enough. I'm just trying to give you some options and I'm going to use the PVA glue still trying to give you some options of how you can work around difficulties like I don't have clamps. Here's another option. I'm actually going to just take my cheap paint brush that I don't mind ruining and I'm going to glue in between. And the reason more than anything that we're doing this is so that those pages glue together right there at that seam and create a surface to paint on where we're not having big gaps in between these pages. It's not going to be perfect, it's not going to be the same or maybe even as good as the solution with the clamps that I showed you because that one is still setting up on its side. Just over here out of the way with nice thick glue in between and it's going to give me a lovely perfect binding. This might not be as perfect, but it'll be good enough. If this is the solution that you have available, and I don't want to push this brush too far in. I don't want there to be glue too far in there, but I do want to glue those together so that when I open them they're glued together. But I'm just trying to give you another solution that you could maybe use. If you're like, I don't have that, I can't get that. I can't do that, whatever. Here's how you could do that. Just problem solve and think, I might not have whatever it is that I'm using, you might not have that, but how could you problem solve around that. For the spine, this might be the way you do that. Okay. And you don't worry about the threads and stuff because we're going to make a cover to go on this and you won't even see the inside of the book. I like it to be neat looking and everything, but it doesn't have to be perfect. The goal is not perfect. It's an art book, and if something's not perfect on the inside, you could paint over it Cg glue new paper on it. I mean, there's ways around the problems. I wish it were a tiny bit even heavier, but that's okay. This will do what we need it to do. Now, this PVA glue is really nice because it dries clear, it's flexible. It's not going to be something that's real stiff. It's going to let the pages move with it totally glued a whole brush here. I'm just making sure I got enough glue on there and hopefully I'll do what I want it to do. If not, when I open it up, I'll run be glue down the middle of these pages that are open if it didn't glue completely. I just don't want it to open and we see a raw spine peeking the signatures. Okay. Hopefully, I got enough where it's touching another piece of paper, and it might not be perfect, but it's good enough. We're going to let that dry just like that, preferably overnight and then we'll make the covers tomorrow because now I've got two different ones that I need to make covers for that we're drying right now, and I will see you in a bit. 9. Mixed Paper Book Cover: All right. I am ready to make the cover for our true mixed journal here that we made, the edges of dried. I just hope that they stick together like I think they will. Let's see. We get to a page like this and it's not going to be perfect perfect, but it's definitely close enough exactly what I wanted. Good. It may not be dry dry. I may have jumped the gun here, but I just want to see So it's going to have a gap on some of these. So if we glue the cover like I just glued it, it may or may not stick together, but that's okay. It's close enough. It's enough for me to come back and either glue those pages like I did originally, which on the book that I showed you that I did that, I glued the water color pages. I just came. I might do this as we're letting it dry overnight, but I ran a beat to glue along the watercolor edge, and then as it was drying overnight, that stayed glued. I'm going to assume that on this one, I need to do that again. If you skip the glue binding part, and just do run the bead along and then let that dry overnight with the cover, that would probably be fine. These are just things that you're going to discover as you're going is what it is, but that's okay. I'm pretty happy with that I could even run the glue down the cover as we're working. Because I'm not going to need to open the book back up. This is basically all I do is run the bead down the cover, close that up and then as that's drying overnight and being squished flat, that will create a nice bond and close that up for us to have a better surface to paint on when we're doing a two page spread, which is my goal. And you can leave the gap. It doesn't matter, but I want to do two page spreads. I did not let this dry overnight, this dry while I ate lunch. I'm going to just attach these and let these be drying as we're making the cover. I'm going to make a hard cover for this one so that we can see how we make a hard cover. I know I made a hard cover a little bit on that first book that we did that was glue binding, these here. We already worked with something hard. I did a soft, might as well do a hard end real quick and show you how to do that. On these, you might do the cover a tiny bit larger than the whole book just to have a tiny bit of an overlap, but I'm going to say that right there, get myself a pencil and mark that right here. If I want a little overlap, I can move it down to give myself some extra space. I'm going to set that to the side. I've got my big ruler, and I'm just going to cut this with a exacto knife. A nice sharp blade. I got this ruler at the **** Blick yesterday. It's a ALU alum cutter, but I like it because it's got a finger hold, and then a little bit larger edge that maybe you could use to protect your hand. It's got this matting here on the bottom, a little bit of rubber matting to really grip your surface, and I think I like it. We're going to give this one a play. Whatever ruler you got handy is fine though. I just like this. Now to do the book like this, I'm just going to go several swipes so that because it's real thick. Then when it's ready to separate, you can mostly see that it's separated, there we go. Then we're going to be covering that up. I'm not worried about if it's perfect perfect or not. Then we'll do this edge I just got off of as I come this way, I tend to curve a little bit. I just saw that I curved. I'm going to try really hard not to do that. There we go. I'm going to keep this part and see how thick is my book. Then this is going to be the back part of this binding. I'm going to mark that with a ruler and actually cut that and this is going to be the back of our spine. You can measure it to get it exact if you want. I'm just going for it. I eyeballing it. There we go. All right. So there's our spine for the back of the book. I'm going to make a hard back. Then going to use my second piece. This one because of the weird size does actually take two pieces of this to make our book. That's all. Just going to draw on there and just duplicate the one that we've already cut. That's a extra. That's a piece of extra. That's our back spine. Now, just going to line this up. Okay. There we go. I'll cut this one. You want to stand up when you're doing this so that you can really get your weight on to your ruler and you want to be very careful not to cut yourself and your hand, go slow, be very careful. There we go. These are going to be just pieces I'm saving for another project later. Okay. And we are ready. We are ready. Now we need to decide, what do you want the cover to be? Do you want it to be something that you painted? Do you want it to be a handmade piece of paper? I'm going to make mine a handmade piece of paper because I got such pretty handmade papers that I want to use one. I got some really good ones. I went to **** Blick and did some shopping yesterday because I was visiting a friend of mine. Now I'm like gaga over some of these pretty papers that I'm going to use one of those. Basically what you need? Here's the layout of the spine. And you need a piece of paper that is just slightly bigger than this whole layout. So maybe 3 " bigger width and height of whatever size it is that you've made. Let me go grab a piece of handmade paper and I'll be right back. Okay. This piece of paper here, I love loved. Now, of course, the only drawback to using something that's got such a geometric pattern is if we get it crooked, it's going to look odd, but I don't even care. This is called colorful squares, handmade in Nepal by gift land, and it's GSP 45610, and it's a 20 by 30 sheet of handmade paper. So I got this at the **** Blick. There's no guarantee obviously that anybody else could get a piece of this besides the one piece that I got, but now I love it so much I wish I had bought two. I wish I had bought two. I will say this is the front and we'll say the side with the tag on it is the back because I'm really not sure. And it's pretty on both sides. Basically, I want this to be big enough that I've got a gap, not a big gap, just a little gap, maybe eighth of an inch. I want enough to fold over at the top and the bottom, I only need to come a little bit over because you're not going to see what's on the inside here because it's going to be covered. But I want it to be able to cover up a bit. And it looks like I wish I had bought more of this paper. I'm telling you, I cannot even tell you how much I love this paper. My friend was like, because I went with my friend and looked around at the flick, and then we went and had a lunch. So much. I'm going to go I drive back over there and buy another piece of this paper. Okay. And we had lunch at Panera Bread and she saw me going through the handmade paper drawers and she's like, that's so bright. Why are you getting that? I'm like, I love it. Don't let anybody bust your bubble. Okay. Doesn't have to be perfect. But oh, my gosh. This paper is so pretty. Basically, what we are going to do. We're going to glue this down. Where is here we go. The goal here is to have it with enough space that this can still turn the cover corner and not be so tight that it can't turn that corner. I had that I had it right there. Let's see, was that enough. I really need to. You're just going to look at this and see and judge it See right there would be fine. Let's see what that is. Okay. Yeah, that's about what I was figuring. We're going to say that's probably an eighth of an inch. Let's measure it a quarter of an inch. We're going to give it a quarter of an inch. What I'm going to do is I'm going to glue these down. Let's start with this one, and we'll just do as good as we can. Okay. Okay. And another thing to think of too, at this point, this is the stage where you would add a piece of ribbon or you would add say a piece of elastic. This is the stage that you would add that to. So if you want ribbon or elastic on on on your book to, you know, ribbon it close or whatever elastic it closed. This is where you would think of that because you would kind of attach that in between this layer and whatever layer is getting glued down on top of it, I'm just going to clean this up to there we go. Um. I'm just going to eyeball that for where I want it to go. I'm trying to keep it straight. I don't want it all walky and crooked. I'm going to glue the whole back side of this. And maybe take that paper spreader. Here we go. Paper spreader I made and I don't want any ridges. I don't want any of these circles making a ridge or anything that might pop up below the paper. All right. And I'm going to give it that quarter of an inch. Try to be straight. I want to be even. For the moment, I want the bone spreader, but I'm going to have to s glue this one down first, my little spreader because that way, I can really flip it over and make sure we don't have any weird air vols or something. Also have a glue stick. This is a spot that a glue stick is going to be good when we flip this edge over. If you've got glue sticks, s is the time to get your glue stick out. I like acid free, so they don't yellow. I'm using a photo glue stick because I happen to have them. Mine is craft phototic and it works fine. It's acid free, so it's not going to yellow with the piece. There we go. Then we're going to stick this down over here. Still trying to get my quarter of an inch and be level. All right. Does that look good? I think that's good. Might take practice if you do this and you're like, didn't work right. Might have to practice on a second one. Look how pretty this is. I'm just coming over here to make sure we've got no weird air bubbles or anything. Look at this cover. Now, this is what's good about making your own art books. You can make art books with a cover as beautiful as this. Oh, my goodness. Now, what we're doing. I'm just going to double check it now that I've glued it. Make sure that it's actually going to shut for us. Oh, yeah. Good. Good job. Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to peel this over and then the first page here is going to be glued down to the book and that's going to be my book flap. Sometimes you do a different book page or different book paper on here that you'll see people do that. I'm using the journal for that and may not come out perfect, but we're going to try I may have this one might not have left enough room on this side. We'll see. Hang on. We're going to judge this in a minute. Just cut these edges. You want to leave an eighth of an inch, you want to be outside this little thing and you can maybe cut it in the shape of a little y there, a little triangle. Put that on there. So thinking. I might have If I don't have enough flap, I have some extra paper. So allow yourself a little extra. That's what we're looking for. Be it may I don't know. I've got some extra paper, but basically what we're doing now, is making the fold, and we're going to glue these down. That's why I was saying a glue stick is handy with this because I just threw my paper down. I need some of this so that I don't glue a disc. This is where a glue stick is handy though because now we can do this. Real fast and easy and glue that paper right down, you can use that same PVA glue. I just find this the easy way. Then just pull my and gently this away. Yeah. Then I'm going to come from this direction so that there's no chance that I'm pulling the paper walk by by pulling it with the side next to it. I want to pull opposite sides just to make sure that I'm not pulling the paper in a direction that I didn't intend because if I went to this side, I might pull it off some might not be what I wanted. Okay. Then we're going to glue this edge, and I do think this edge is going to be too short, so you know what I'm going to do. Let's just do it before we're too side. I'm just going to cut a strip to be a little bigger. And I'm going to cut it to the height here. And then we're not going to see it, so it doesn't have to be perfectly straight on the inside because remember, I'm gluing paper on top of this. But it is just to make sure I'm not left cardboard showing because I need a tiny bit longer edge, but I like making a little tiny bit of a weird mistake just in case because I want you to be able to fix things like this too if you come across it rather than getting up on, I did this or that and I didn't mean to. I feel like we're there. Let's go ahead and get some glue on this paper. And then I'll pull that edge around. I could have matched that up, and I'm just not worried about it. This one's definitely long enough. Definitely leave yourself a good inch on each end, maybe a little more because the cover is a tiny bit bigger than our books. Maybe even an inch and a half. Figure yourself an extra. I'm going to call an inch and a half. Let's glue this one down. This is the most beautiful paper. You'll know because we left that tiny bit of an edge a little bit outside the edge. We've got a nice crisp corner like we wrapped to paper. We don't have cardboard hanging out. So don't cut that paper up to the cardboard, you'll end up with some cardboard hanging out. Now look how beautiful that cover is. Now we're ready to glue it to the book. Here's the book. Oh. Oh, my gosh. Oh my goodness. That's going to be our finished book with our Yumi pages in it. People are going to see you use this and they're going to be like, where did you get that book and you're going to be like, I made it. Now we're going to want to glue the book. What we're going to do, I'm going to put glue on this side, I'm going to glue this page to this. Then I'll do the other side. I'm actually going to throw some glue down the spine so that it sticks to the book. We could do some glue down the edge here because we're going to just tap that in. Then I'm not going to glue this because I don't want to go edge to edge. I'm going to put the glue on the paper here because I'm gluing this paper to that edge. Okay. So plenty of glue on here. This is going to be the inside cover of the book. So you could do a different inside cover if you want to be fancy about it and have a book end age. But because I'm wanting it to be an art book, that's a page that maybe we're going to paint. I want it to be the same material as what I have in the book. Okay. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. Now, Let's see if I can do this without getting it everywhere. Now I'm wanting this to be let's see, right there. Let's go ahead and do I have it centered? Let me see. Let me turn the book where I can actually see both ends. There we go. Before I'm even done with that, let's put the glue on this other page before we're finished. So that I can get this to open up and then we can flatten it. I will say all the books that I've made in class. Let's see. I made one, two, three, four. This is the fifth book. I'm just now getting to the e to the end of the glue. That glue looks like it does about five books for that size. Just in case you're wondering that's about how far that glue bottle has gone for me. Now I'm going to glue that down. And then we're going to see. Whoa. You see how we can get that little edge right there. Now I'm going to open it up and just make sure that I've got these, no glue coming out, but I do want to smooth that out. I don't want a lot of glue at the edge of that page because I don't want it spilling out really. But I do want to dry flat. Look at that. Oh, my goodness. That's the inside of the book now and it closes look how pretty this is. Now, I'm just going to check the back one and take my bone spreader and make sure that got it nice and flat in there. That's the back of the book and you can see the extra piece that I've glued down might not have been necessary because you can't even see it. I did obviously have enough room there, but I was happy to do better safe than sorry, basically. Let me just edge this down. Just run my finger along that soft edge and look how pretty that spine is. This book is gorgeous. Okay. There we go. We are done with this book, and then what I'm going to do because I'm going to let sit this underneath some heavy books overnight because that is a big piece of cardboard and it got wet with the glue, I could warp a little bit. Once you've got it all glued up, and you're like, wow, then I want you to stack this under some heavy books and let that sit overnight and then you're good to go and you're ready to use the book. That will make sure too that the things that we glued the extra pages that we glued are definitely going to stick together. All right. I hope you enjoyed making one of these yummy mixed media books that let me grab my big stack of stuff here that mimics our Dana Wakey book because now that we can't get these anymore and they're not available anymore. I almost thought, Oh, no, I'm not going to be able to use my Dana Wakey book to continue making videos because so inspired at how beautiful these turn out. Now I can't use it anymore because nobody can get it. Now, We have made our own. We've made a cool cover on it. You could make art on it. You could use a brown paper cover and do art on it. You could do a different handmade paper. You could do something that you painted. But now our cover is already decorated, and then we have all the super fun different pages that we've put in just like that one that we can then use and experiment on and create just like that was. How easy was that to make? It was relatively easy and done all in one day technically because I did all the signatures that took 45 minutes before lunch. Then I left that all dry where I glued it. You didn't even have to do that glue it didn't really work the way I intended it. So you could have just kept on going. Then what did we spend here? Another 15 or 20 minutes, making the cover, and then we're done. We have a art journal with different types of papers in it that we can now use to make art and work in for the next however long it takes to fill these up. I hope you enjoy making this. I'm so thrilled with mine, I can't even tell you. I will see you back in class. 10. Recap & Paper Prep For Painting: All right. Let's do a little recap of what we made in class today so that we could talk about how to prep pages if you've used any weird pages. In the little books, I have used watercolor paper, and these are the perfect bound books. Any watercolor paper is already ready for a wet surface, whether it be watercolor or acrylic or anything, anything like that. The thing about the perfect bound books is they are more of a flat lay book, so it lays flat. It's a glued binding, and it's not really made to stretch out. If you want to do a lot of collage in a book like this, I would say that this would not be the right book for the collage because it'll get too fat and I think you'll break your spine. If you're going to do a lot of collage work, do your sewed signatures instead of gluing these like you do in a regular book. But this is perfect for any drawing, sketching inking, watercolor guash acrylic. You could even prep these for oil paint if you wanted that or you could have used oil paper in here. You could have used Arches oil paper to have a book with oil paintings in it. Lots of choices there. But mostly that's ready to go if you did watercolor paper in a perfect binding. I even have a bigger one that I did with the Homule watercolor paper. Again, this is going to be for flat works. It will not work as well for a lot of bulk or heft or height because you'll tear that spine pretty easily. If you're doing the watercolor journal that we made with the signature because that's where we started, binding our signature to a watercolor cover. Those are ready to paint and go for it. If you used other papers in here, like I did in the big journal, Then you could use clear gesso to prep just about any surface that you wanted to paint. If you used canvas or burlap or linen or drop cloth or other handmade papers, any of those things, anything that I wanted to paint on, I would clear Gesso, let that dry and then I'm ready to go old book pages, old papers. This is the perfect stuff for prepping those. Again, my watercolor journals, and I like working on the watercolor paper because it takes any type of paint that I want to do. When you get around to the mixed journal that has the different papers in it and you can do that with any of the journals that you make. But this one was specifically my duplicate of the Dina Wakey journal. That we can no longer get. This was my solution to still be able to work in a journal like that without being able to buy it. I can't even tell you how much I love this journal. This paper that I picked for the cover, I love love it. It's almost like color palette almost. You could definitely mark this off and paint your own and have a painted cover. But when I found this at the art store, I'm like, I need this paper. I love it so much. We've got craft paper pages in it, and if you paint a craft paper page without putting gesso on it, which I have done. Let's just look at it. It will soak into that paper and look almost like you stained it. This is some water color and some acrylic paint on a stencil and you see it just soaked into it. It's like you painted on a grocery bag and it just soaked right in. So if you're wanting that look, then don't prep it. If you are wanting it to be the paint sit on top of it like it is here, then the page first and then paint on top of it because you can see all of this very clearly, sitting on top, it didn't soak in. It is a different type of paint. It's acrylic paint instead of watercolor. But you can feel the texture of the gesso and so I gesso this so that it didn't sink in and give me this faded look Canvas. This is eso. Burlap. The burlap, I actually painted just like it was, but because it is so heavily loosely woven. It's a loose weave thing. Anything you do on this side soaks right through to the backside. On all of these, my solution on the back side was to glue a piece of art on top of it. I did that just about every single time that I did that because whatever I painted on this side soaks through to this side. If you paint on this side, it's going to soak through to that side. I thought they would be competing with each other and everything running into everything and I wouldn't have a clear design on either side. I decided to paint one side, I did not just sew this. I just painted right on top of it, analytic soak through. So when I did that, I made sure I had wax paper to protect the page that I was pressing down on. Then on the other side, I just painted something on a loose piece of paper, hand toward the edges and then glued it in, and then that worked out, fantastic. Okay. So I did it on this one, too, worked every time. On the Canvas pages. If you've got Canvas or jute Those pages, I did eso every single time. Some of them I painted on without the Gesso, actually. Now that I'm thinking about it, I've been working on this one for a while. The Canvas shrinks. I think that the linen might shrink or whatever also. If you paint on it and it shrinks, just know that's what it's going to do. These two pages were the same size and this one shrunk. And so I realize now that's what that does, and I'm okay with that. That's why I'm telling you that's what that does. It shrinks. You may have some papers that you paint on like that that shrink up. Just be aware. Because in this one, I used the craft paper, so I can either paint on it and let things soak in like a stain or I can gesso it and paint on top of it. I also used some of this linen stuff that I found at the **** Blick. That may shrink up and it may not. I'm just aware that that is a possibility and I'm okay with that. Um I also used that jute. So I know that that's going to soak right through whatever I paint there, and I will need to protect the page underneath it when I'm working on it. And then there is some canvas in here. I'm expecting the canvas to shrink to shrink. So if I paint on it, whether I just sew it or not. If you just sew it, that might pre shrink it, so when you paint on it, it won't shrink more. But either way, I'm expecting that to shrink. Then I got another piece of that linen back here. That's how I'm going to handle the different types of pages and papers that I've used here in this workshop and how I'm going to handle anything with some bulk. I I'm wanting to create something, mixed media wise or that is going to have collage work in it or any layers, then I'm going to work in a book that's made to be flexible and those layers just are going to make the book fatter and fatter without tearing up my book. I'm not going to do that on these perfect bound ones because that's definitely going to eventually tear your spine and tear the pages out. Just things to be aware of and how I would prep the different pages that you might end up putting together in your books. I'll see you back in class. 11. Final Thoughts: Wrapping up this art journal bookmaking workshop, I'm thrilled with the journey that we've embarked on together through the exploration of various binding techniques and the personalization of our journals with unique artistic touches. We've not only crafted beautiful physical creations, but also delved into the depths of our own creativity. As we part ways, I encourage you to continue using your handmade journal as a canvas for self exploration and experimentation. Allow your creativity to flow freely onto the pages. Remember, this workshop is just the beginning of a fulfilling artistic journey. I can't wait to see where the creativity takes you next.