Fabric Snippet Rolls and Clusters: Enhancing Your Art Journal Covers

1. Introduction: Everyone, and welcome to Fabric Snippet rolls in Clusters, enhancing your art journal covers class. In this class, you'll embark on a creative journey, learning how to create beautiful custom journals with fabric covers. We'll start by refreshing your skills in sewing signatures and perfect binding techniques, ensuring you're ready for the fun ahead. We'll dive into the world of fabric, making intricate snippet rolls and charming fabric clusters with various fabrics and decorations. I'm Denise Love, an artist and creative educator, and I'm excited to bring you this fun and exciting dive into handmade art journals. You'll discover how to source perfect materials, whether it be from local stores or curated online kits. By the end of this workshop, you'll have a stunning, one of a kind fabric covered journal and the skills to create many more unique pieces. Join me and let your creativity flourish. Oh 2. Class Project: This class project, you'll create a personalized fabric journal from scratch to finish. Utilizing the binding method of your choice, you'll craft the journal structure before diving into the decorative elements. You'll make snippet rolls and fabric clusters using a variety of fabrics and embellishments, which will serve as the unique decorative elements for your journal cover. By the end of class, you'll have a beautifully bound custom fabric journal, complete with creative pockets and personalized touches, showcasing your new found skills and artistic flare. Oh. 3. What Inspired This Workshop: Want to tell you a little bit about what inspired me to make another book class. It's got some same techniques as the first three book classes that I've put together. But I've been really inspired lately by fiber arts and fabric and maybe making myself a couple of other sizes and working with some vintage things. After I had made the first workshop where I did the hardcover watercolor book. I love this because you can use any paper that you want and the books lay flat and you can do a good size piece of work in there. I wanted some more of those in different sizes. But maybe with fabric covers and stuff and it all originally started with the mixed media journal with the different papers in here and being able to work and play and paint in a book rather than on loose pieces of paper so that when I'm all done, I will have beautiful finished art books that can then sit around rather than being retired into a tub or a bin. Then I went from paper pieces that you glue to pieces that you sew or glue using vintage fabrics and different techniques with those. They also have fun closures and some different papers. This is a watercolor book and this fabric one here is another mixed media with some different papers and things in here to inspire your creativity. But it's got a beautiful sone cover. Now, I'm going to do books similar to this in this workshop and similar to our original. This is another one with lovely papers in here to get really creative and challenge you in your art practice. S can see, how many different things that I've done here with a very simple technique basically of either gluing the pages together or sewing the signatures. While this is probably one of my most favorite things that I've made. It's also at the same time drives me a little tiny bit nuts, having the seam in between the signatures, which that's completely how that's supposed to be. It is still beautiful, but when you get to a same right here, there's two separate pages rather than one big layout. I wanted to do some more with some extra fancy covers, but in a way that when you get to a seam, you can't tell that there was a seam there, for the most part, you could paint and keep on going. That's my goal. I thought I would just show you some new ideas and trinkets that I have come across for for doing it for myself and just to give you some ideas. Some of the making of the actual book, the signatures themselves will be something if you've already looked at the other workshops that I have. It's going to be a repeat or rehash or just showing you again the basics of making the book. If you have not seen one of those, then you're in for a treat and seeing how it is that you can very easily create the most gorgeous art journal for yourself. And so I've made one, and I love it so much that I want some more and I want to show you some fun things that I've got going. This book uses minimal sewing, and we've got a beautiful snippet roll that I have used for the binding. We've got beautiful vintage linens and a pocket that I've created on the front with an old button from my grandmother's button box, who knows how old that is, but it's beautiful. I great piece of little sorry ribbon to then close it up. We've also used a little bit of a snippet roll underneath that just to add to it. Now, I'm so super inspired to create snippet rolls, which this is what a snippet roll is. I wanted to show you how easy these are to make what is a snippet roll? It's basically a long skinny collage in fabric or paper. Or vintage elements or whatever you want to create it out of. I've created my snippet roll out of fabric and ribbons and vintage elements and crocheted pieces, and that's what I have used here on the different elements of this book, some of the snippet that I didn't decorate yet, I love how gorgeous this is. A snippet roll is just that. It's a long collage piece of fabric that you can display like it is. You can roll it on A vintage spool and decorate with it. You can snip pieces off and use those in your art journals, on your covers, on tags, on cards, and you snip off whatever part that you want to use in that project. They're beautiful pieces of art that you've created in a long role. These are fun. I wanted to show you how easy these are to make. I also wanted to talk a little bit about fabric clusters, which are basically little pretty pieces that are clusters that you have created out of leftover bits and scraps. When you get to the very end of say a fabric roll or a piece of fabric or you have just a little tiny piece left over, You don't want to throw those away, you want to keep those and make something like a little fabric cluster with what you've got leftover. These are really beautiful to then use in the same way that you use snippet rolls. You can use them on tags, you can use them on cards. You could use them as a pretty cover of closure. You could decorate the edge of your book. You could create or put a pocket inside and that could be the decoration on the pocket. These are really beautiful. My purpose in this class is to talk about fabric sources, making some more art books for myself in a smaller size than I originally made in those other workshops. This comes out to about seven or 8 " by 10 " because I used a ten by 14 pie of pieces of paper to create these in here. It's a less intimidating size than the bigger books and it's so beautiful and then displayed on your shelf or on your coffee table, these are gorgeous. That is my inspiration for doing another bookworkshop, even though we will be refreshing our memory on how to create books. I wanted to be able to tell you why I made another one. I want to show you how to make snippet rolls to then use in your work. Maybe some fabric clusters and then talk about some fabric sources and to show you a few book trinkets that I have gotten that have been fantastic little additions to your book tools. I can't wait to see what you create in this class. I'll start off by telling you about the supplies and some fabric sources that have just been so amazing, I think you're going to love it. Let's get started. 4. Inspiring Books: Always like to share a few inspiring books and things when I make a workshop. I want to show you a few books that I've gotten recently that I have just found super inspiring, going in the direction of fabric snip rolls and fiber arts, and maybe a little bit of sewing or maybe sewing is not your thing and you can glue, but I like using fabrics and fibers in my art. These books by Shelly Rhodes, fragmentation and repair and Sketchbook explorations. Are currently two of my very favorite books and I find them so inspiring. I just thought that we could take a look inside these books to show you why I find them inspiring. In here, she talks about having a daily practice and her different fiber. This is a long snippet role right here. She's using the roles as art rather than probably snipping them and using them in your creations. But I find them inspiring either way. Some people when they make roles are of the more is more philosophy, so you decorate it to the nines and you keep adding extra elements and a little bit of bling. Whereas I like the roles to be more of the texture and color and the stripe of different fabrics and different things that you include in the piece. That's just a little difference in the way that maybe I approach a snippet role versus some other people. Look at these. This is like three different roles right here. And that's really what I find so inspiring about the snippet rolls, the color, the texture, the pattern of the elements, the stitching, if we add stitching. That's what I love, and you'll see that most of my snippet rolls and maybe even the layered fabric clusters. Maybe a little simpler and less blinged up. Because if you go towards the junk journal end of stuff. Look at this right here. I just love those so much. They're beautiful and you've got stitching in there and fabric and texture and color. That's what I love. If you go more towards the junk journal end, you'll have a lot of layers on top of that and maybe some other elements that are getting added to your role. Just depends on what you're interested in creating. Look at that right there. That right there. I find that so inspiring. I love it. Look at this. Having a ribbon of your different fasteners and needles. Love that. This book, I see something different. Look at that role right there. I see something different and beautiful every single time that I look through it. This is two of my new favorite books. We'll flip through this other one in just a moment. I just wanted to give you look how beautiful that is. An idea of what's in here to see if this might be something that inspires you also and maybe you'd want to have it to continue to look at it. It's a beautiful book. I love that these are fabric covered. They're really beautiful books. That was fragmentation and repair for Mixed Media and textile artist by Shelly Rhodes. This other one that I really love also is Sketchbook Explorations. This I believe is the first one that she wrote a few years back and this is her new book. Her art is so beautiful that I could buy 100 books that she wrote. So definitely love both of these. This one is more in the Sketchbook things and Again, like long roles, what I would consider a snippet role, but definitely the long pieces of art like we're creating. I love seeing how other artists approach this and what I can then take forward in my own art. Nice, big long piece there. She goes through different tools that you can use in your sketchbook. There's a lot of good information in here as well as just inspiring pages to look at. I like the pictures and a lot of these because I am really attracted to her art. I would love to have a piece of her fiber to hang in my house, but having the books is just about as good. Look how beautiful those are. You can use these little strips as pieces of art in your sketchbook. You could save some that were your really favorite pieces and that could be a page in your book. And then she talks about rolls and scrolls here also, making your own. Hers is paper in this one. Yeah, another. Look at that right there. So beautiful. Then you can see how she ties that in with different layouts and stuff. So beautiful. Goodness. I just love this book. That one's a really good one. I have another book here that's a little bit older book, so it may or may not be. Still out there and available daydream journals by Tilly Rose. This gets into maybe some stitching if you wanted to do a little bit of slow stitching or hand stitching onto your fabric pieces. She has some interesting things in here. I really love this piece, where it's some lace and some grass and things on top of the burlap. That's a really beautiful stitch piece. Also, I just love looking at some of the different ideas. Here's a longer piece right here in the vein of what we're creating with the rolls. I love this and the fringe that hangs down from it. You can see when you're creating your snippet rolls, you can decorate them up a whole lot more than I choose to do. Some people are more is more, and if you're the more is more, definitely keep on adding to it. Here's some great ideas on what that might look like. I love that. She's used different pieces of ribbon, some fabrics, some stitching, some lace, some buttons. What else in here? Any beads. There may be some beads, there's more buttons there, little onlay pieces that are made of fabric, a little tag. Looks like a rusty nail maybe right there. So more buttons and a piece of lace on top of the fabric. Lots of choices there that you can layer on top of and it goes right in with our fabric covers and things. If you like hand stitching, you might do like a sampler piece of different stitches as part of your cover or your snippet roll. Lots of good ideas there in this book. Do love just having some stuff to flip through and be inspired by. This is a good older book that I happen to have had that I wanted to share with you just so that you have some inspiration to go back to if you need it. This book may be older, I think it might be a used copy that I got, but it's daydream journals by Tilly Rose. I hope you enjoy the books that I've shared with you this time. I'd like to just give you a few each time as some little extra inspiration in the different workshops. I hope you enjoy these and I'll see you back in class. 5. Supplies: Let's take a look at the supplies that we I will at least be using in the workshop. Then as you're watching what we're doing, you can decide on what you want to have. Some of this is definitely a refresher from the other bookmaking workshops, but just in case you didn't see those, I don't want to skip over the information. For your book that you're going to possibly make. You need different types of papers for the book itself. I choose to make the mixed Media books inspired by the mixed Media journal that is no longer commercially available because that book is no longer made. I decided to make my own versions of that a journal that I enjoyed working on so much. I choose to put different papers in my book, different handmade papers, and some of these, maybe you'll paint on it. Some of these are so beautiful that you might think, that's a piece of art just like it is, and I'm going to leave it, and I'm going to paint on this page, and I'm going to paint on that page, and I'll just have this pretty divider. This could be something to that maybe you decide to put a pocket on and then you could glue something like some fabric in here and create some little tuck spots, and then tuck some vintage papers or tuck in some old letters or anything that you want to tuck into the different spaces, that could be the finished pad for that, and something over here, a painted piece of art. Don't shy away from papers that you've never worked on and you're thinking, Oh, I don't know about that. I'm scared of it. You could just have it in there for the sake that it's beautiful. And you could also create something on top of it or collage on top of it or draw on top of it. That's the interesting thing about different papers is the challenge and the interest that they create in your book. Because that's what I enjoy about these books, and the more you put in it, the fatter they get, and the more interesting they are and things will lean out. I choose to make art journals so that I can make art in them. A lot of people make junk journals and add commercially made snippets and pictures and different things like that. You can do that with any of these, you can make them into a junk journal. I feel like in my mind, the junk journal is just not as meaningful for me as an art journal. I feel like the junk things are just pieces. I pulled together like when I was scrapbooking, and maybe they don't have quite the meaning as a piece of art I created. I shy away from the junk aspect of the journals, but people love those, and this will be perfect for those. You want different papers. I choose to use papers like the Cty paper, which is an Indian 100% cotton paper. This paper is weird to work on. It's not like a regular, nice quality watercolor paper. It's got its own properties. What I like about it, it's good for mixed media stuff. If it buckles while you're using it, it tends to flatten out when it's done. It comes in a natural color. I have used this paper in this book. It's got the hand decled edges and I like that about it, but it is not like a regular paper, but it is economical. If you're making a big book and you're wanting to keep the cost down a little bit, and you want to include a few of those pages or make the whole thing out of the cody paper, you could. But if you're used to working on, sorry, if you're used to working on arches or the Home paper, it is not the same as that and you might get frustrated with this paper. But I choose to use some of the cody papers. Other papers that you could consider putting in your journal would be whatever favorite paper you like to work on. These books that I'm making in class, I'm using a ten by 14 size. I'm using arches, coal press, arches hot press. I'm using some Canson Heritage, which is a coal press watercolor paper that happened to be in my closet that I can no longer get. But I thought, that'd be perfect in these books because it's the right size. You could use a mixed media paper if you wanted to do different media and collage work, that would be good. The Strathmore has an 11 by 14 pad that would be a good size. You pick out whatever your favorite paper is. To use, and you need one pad of that, and then the backside is what I make the cover out of. This is the bookboard that I'm using on these particular journals. I'm using the back of that pad. Then I chose to include handmade papers. These, you can get from Mulberry papers online, you can get from Blick online, you can go to the Blick store and see these in person, which is what I did. These are the end pieces after I've cut some up for some books. I like these highly colored pages that are handmade. They've got a lovely edge, and that could be The page itself. I almost feel like I don't need to put more on that, but I could doodle and draw on that if I wanted. I could collage on that. I just love the vibrancy of the colors. I love the ones that have a doodle on it already. I really love this mixed fiber looking one. I also loved this one that looks like a cyanotype, but in green. It's so beautiful. Almost like the bleached out ferns just reminds me of the sinotype, and this paper is beautiful. I love this one. Also love these semi transparent ones. Now, these really do look like pieces of art to me, so I don't know that I will be painting on those, but I love it, and I love this one that looks like torn paper and it's handmade and I love the textural element of it. I don't even feel like I need to do anything to it. I could paint it to stain it into a different color. That would be fun. A lot of fun things that you can do with the handmade papers on my book here. I have made four signatures in this book, and out of that four pages are different papers. There's the ti paper. There's a hot press paper, there's a handmade paper. There's another coal press paper, and then that's the center. It's got four watercolor papers and two handmade papers. That's not a full one because that's the starter. I put two handmade papers in each section on some of these, this book, I might have just put one handmade paper and had watercolor cody watercolors. You can see how you can play around and just change up the configuration. This one now that I'm looking at it. I think the ones that I prepped for class, I did two handmade papers, but it looks like in this one, I did one handmade paper, and I did four different watercolor papers. I've got watercolor, I've got the cod and those watercolor papers are hot press and coal press. You can see how you can play around with that. If you wanted to keep it down to price wise, a minimal investment. Then there's basically two different handmade papers, and four to five pages of the watercolor papers. If you did two pads of paper and two handmade papers, you could get something like I have done here in this book and get a nice variety, but kept the price more reasonable for yourself. Got the papers, got the handmade papers. I'm also using a book kit, basically a book kit consist of a bone folder, a great big embroidery needle, which is what I use to sew the signatures, and I keep those in a little need needle thing here, but it's a great big needle with a big head, and that's what we use to sew the signatures, which is what that paper section is called. It's called a signature. That's how we sew that in, and you saw that here in the middle here, my stitches. It's a very basic easy stitching and that is what connects all these little sections together. It is the very most basic of sewing. Anybody can do it proms. I don't want to lose the needle, I'll sb myself with it. You need a needle, a bone folder. I've got several needles, so I keep them in a little tin there. You need an all, which is a very sharp pointy thing, and you need some waxed thread. The reason why I have all these little wax threads out is you can either buy a quantity of two or three colors in this size. This is probably what you can find at the art store if you go to the art store. Or I found this fun little listing on Amazon for a variety of colors. You might look for waxed thread on Amazon and see if you can get some colored ones because look at how fun these are and because I'm making a fun funky book in this class, I want a fun thread. These are waxed threads. You can certainly buy linen thread and wax it yourself. Here's what the wax looks like, and you basically cut off a piece of thread and pull it through the wax, so you're waxing the thread. I've got some linen thread, something like this. But you wax the thread. This is a book thread. I got it from somewhere that sells book thread, but basically you pull off your length of thread and you pull through this wax, just digging it down in there and it waxes the thread. It's not as nice or as sturdy as the pre waxed thread, which is why I Prefer that, but it is an option. Bs wax and a linen thread. You could to perhaps want a curved needle. If you buy one of the book kits, it'll have some of these curved needles in it. It'll have the straight needle in it. It'll usually have the bone folder in it, I'll usually have the all in it, and it'll usually have some thread in it, and then you have a really cheap book binding kit. That is the way to get started a little cheap book binding kit. If you want to go that way. I also like having a bit of book repair tape. I put these on the spine just as an extra cheat for myself to make it stronger and to make it set up a little faster because I'm gluing the binding, make it set a little faster so I can go ahead and make the cover all in one day rather than letting it dry overnight. I do like book repair tape. This is 2 ". I'm also going to be using glue in class. The most common most common glue that you use on a book is PH neutral adhesive. That's this one by line code. There's a couple brands out there. I have decided after using this a bunch. I actually prefer the lens acid tech glue. You can get tech glue. Anywhere that cell glue basically. But I had to order the acid free online. No base stock to the acid free. The acid free is what's going to make the glue not yellow over the years. You do want to make sure that for your book you're using neutral pH adhesives or acid free adhesive. I like this tacky glue because it's a little thicker and it sets up beautifully and it sets up within really not that much time. We could set it to the side for 15 or 20 minutes while we're working on something else, and then it's basically set up and then just needs to cure overnight, but it's super fun to work with. I also found some Aileen's fabric fusion and I'm thinking that that would be the perfect tape for our snippet rolls. Because if you're doing fabric snippet rolls and you don't want to sew, this I'm thinking would probably be my favorite adhesive for that because this is my favorite adhesive. The Aileen's premium quality fabric fusion is an option. I'm also using a glue stick. This is the ho stick You can get at the art store. I'll be using this on say, like the cover to get the fabric to stick to the cover that we're making. You'll also want to have a selection of fabrics. Whether you go with one of the options where you can order a bundle of fabric and I did a fabric video for you to talk about the different fabric options, but you'll also need on your collection of fabrics because we'll be making snippet rolls and clusters in our books side of fabric. However you decide to pull for your fabric dash. If you've already got one or you order some online or you visit the fabric store. I do give you a bunch of ideas there for fabric. You also need some fabric. Then I told you I had a couple of fun little tools that I have not had before that I've been using that I'm just so excited about that I wanted to be able to show you guys these. These two tools are new to me. In the past couple of weeks, and I've made several books using these and I love them. This tool is a book press. It's a book binding, portable book press. Usually what I've done to press the signatures together or if I'm doing a glued binding to press all the papers together is I have stacked a bunch of books on top of the papers. This, I can squeeze the book into. Hang on. This is a book I have prepped. But what you do is you put all the papers in here, and then you screw this down and now it's ready for you to glue the spine and put the book tape on it and let that set up and be nice and pressed rather than squeezing it in between a bunch of books. This is really nice if you're just doing one book at a time. And the benefit of this particular one. I got it on Amazon. Brand is Miski MOT I SK YY. What I liked about this is it actually came with the little book binding piece itself. It was only 23 bucks that was super good and it was in stock. I was just took a day to come. But look at all of the tools that come with it. If you're thinking, I like that, it also comes with all these tools, the wood book press and everything for 23 bucks. It doesn't get any better than that. It's got the round needles. It's got a thimble, it's got the two bone folders. It's got a glue brush. It's got the wax thread, it's got the all. It's got the straight needles, and it's got something else in there. I'm not sure what that is. That might be some scissors or thread snippers. I don't know. I may have got that. But for $23, for all of that, that's an insane, crazy good price. This is one of my two new favorite book finds because you can actually set it up on the side, let it be leaning on something like that, and it just sets itself up. It's very sturdy and stable with these nice books that we're creating. I thought the book press was super cool and inexpensive, I was shocked. Other fun thing I want to show you is the signature punch. This is, you put your signatures in here, the folded part, and you put this on here. We'll be using this in class. You'll see how it is. Then it is marked at intervals so that you can then take your all and punch your signature because in the classes that we've already done, we've folded our signatures backwards and we try to punch it through and we try to get on the V and sometimes you get on the side rather than on the V. Here we can get our whole perfect every single time all the way through the books spindings. After you make enough of these books, you start thinking, Oh, that actually is a benefit to be able to just go, pop and then your needle is ready to sew it. This little signature punch thing, I love it. Then you definitely want a variety of fabrics and I did a fabric video for you on resources and different things to look for. Definitely check that out next. The other thing that you're going to need if you're doing this fabric roll with me is some muslin fabric or some backer fabric because we're going to take our little snips of fabric and actually attach those to a backer fabric. I've used a medium weight muslin, natural colored muslin for that, which is a perfect type fabric for that. It's also a good fabric, so you can then pull the threads and make it fray because these are pretty with frayed edges. You'll definitely need some muslin. You can get that at the fabric store, you can order a quantity off of Amazon. You can also use some fasteners, So like some of these little safety pins with the little ball head at the bottom. Tim Holtz company has a lot of different interesting creative fasteners, maybe small buttons, anything that you want to use to decorate your snippet with, some ribbons. You could glue different things on here like ephemera, old photos, things that maybe some muslin that you punch words on. I mean, you get real creative here with your junk journal stuff and see how is it that you want to decorate your snippet roll. Anything like that that you happen to have that looks interesting, that you'll be wanting, you'll need to have that also. I'm super excited about making the next book today. Let's go ahead and watch the fabric video on fabric ideas I have for you. With the fabrics, I like different fabrics. This on my inspiration book is like an upholstery fabric. Those are fantastic. I love them when they're soft and fuzzy, like a heal. Love love. I also love cottons. This is like a flannel. These are cotton fabrics, this is a cotton fabric, anything like that, just get created. If you get one of those vintage bundle fabrics, they have all kind of cool fabrics in them that are vintage linens and things like that. Definitely start pulling together and seeing what stuff you can get with your fabrics, and I'll see you guys in class. 6. Fabric Resources: Let's talk about fabric. I know if you're not a sewer and you haven't really ever worked with fabric, it can be intimidating. But you really just need to think of fabric as flexible paper and not be scared of it because you can glue fabric, just like you can glue paper. In my inspiration one that I created, this is all glued. This has a little bit of sewing because I wanted to stitch all the little pieces together, but you could glue these pieces to a snippet roll also and just not work with a sewing machine if you don't have access or you've never worked with a sewing machine before. But you could glue all the bits that I have chosen to do a little bit of sewing on. What I love about something like this is the creativity and the little bits and bobs that you can include to make it look interesting. It's not just a cover wrapped in a piece of fabric, and then you're done. And The original one that I made like this. That's exactly what I did. I just wrapped it in a piece of fabric and it was glued to the board, and then the edges here are glued and the ribbons glued in. But it's very plain and even though it's the most beautiful book because this is a beautiful vintage piece of fabric that I had gotten from a seller on Etsy, I think, from a vine piece of French fabric. Even though that's the most gorgeous piece of fabric, it was just one piece of fabric and the piece is glued on. Whereas here we are taking that leaps and bounds further, and we are creating pockets with vintage pieces and a lovely snippet roll, and then we could do something different on the back if we wanted, and the creativity that we jump into is so much fun and inspiring, that that's why I wanted to make some more books. What do you do? If you don't already have a gigantic stash of fabric? If you do, I want to come and dig in your fabric stashes. If you don't, what do you do? You can obviously go to the fabric store and purchase fabric. I have some fabrics here that I have gotten from the hobby lobby as I was looking around in brainstorming, what I wanted to create with the book that I'm going to be making. And then I've also been to these are all hobby lobby pieces. Now the thing about that is a you pick up a roll of fabric and you go to the counter and you say, I want a half a yard or a quarter of a yard of this fabric and they cut it for you. Then that can get expensive. A half a yard of fabric might be anywhere from $5 to $50 depending on the fabric that you pick. Hobby lobby is not very expensive and I think I might have spent $5 $5 $5 on these half yards, and that was three pieces of fabric and I spent about $15. That's one way to start a fabric dash. I'm going to get into some of this in the second. Another way to start a fabric dash is to do fat quarters that you can get at the fabric store, and this is over there with the quilting cottons where people that do a lot of quilting only want little pieces of fabric. What that basically is is if you get a piece of fabric cut at the counter and you say, I want a quarter of a yard, they cut a quarter of a yard, the whole length of the fabric, so you get a very skinny piece, however long that fabric is. A fat quarter is double that quarter of a yard. It's basically half a yard, but then it's only half of the length instead of the whole length. You get a fatter piece of fabric, even though it's about the same amount of fabric as the quarter of a yard. It's called a fat quarter or a fabric quarter. That runs about 18 " by 21 ", whereas a regular quarter of a yard would be like 9 " by 42 ". Having that 18 " of height in this and the 21 " in length really gives you a lot more options that you can do like the book covers, because if you have 9 " in height, you could only do a book that's like 8 " big. Whereas this 18 " in height, you could do a book that 17 " big. It's really a good thing to be able to buy these quarters at the fabric store. If you go to Joanne fabrics, hobby lobby, any of your local little fabric stores, these usually range a couple dollar per quarter of a yard. I went to Joanne fabrics and they had their 299 at Joanne's and they had a sale going. If you bought ten of these, they were $1. They were $1.99 off. That's ten for $10. I'm like, Heck, yeah, I need some of these. I went through and I bought a bunch of fun little cottons for $1 each. That is the way to really bulk up on some pretty fabrics if you don't have a plan for them is to go look at the little fat quarters and just get some coordinating pieces. And these happen to in my mind, maybe you are pulling together for the fun book that I have in mind that I want to create. That's where those came from. Where else can you go? If you don't want to buy 100 pieces of half yard fabrics, what else can you do? I have discovered if you go to Es and Ebay, you can save that, that's going to be part of a book. You can get what people are calling slow stitching kits. Or art journal fabric kits. Ha. Now you can get and that's what this is right here. Let me set this to the side. This is a slow stitching kit that I found on EtS. This is a slow stitching kit that I found on EtS. And what they generally are is a curated bundle of little pieces of fabric from that person's fabric stash that you can then have to add to your art stash of fabrics. They're much smaller squares of fabric. There are a variety of patterns that they have put together. In a different little quantities and sizes, and you have a fun curated bundle of fabrics without going to the fabric store or buying tons of fabric. This one I thought was really pretty, and these usually run in the range of 15 to $20. For basically $1 or so per little piece of fabric, you've got this beautiful pre curated bundle of fabric to add to your stash. Now, I found this one shop and they may or may not, by the time you're watching this class, depending on whenever you're watching it. When I've made this class, she's still making these beautiful bundles. Let me just pull up her ts shop because I want to share it with you. Then if perhaps she's not making these anymore, if it's a few years down the road, I want you to be able to know what to look for when you get on ts. When you're looking for stuff like this. This Etsy shop is 1924 Linens and more, and I'll put a link to it in my supply PDF. But this is a little shop that curates these beautiful bundles, just like you see it. I have not taken this bundle apart, I've got several over here. I ordered several bundles because even though I have done lots of sewing through the years, it's been a while, but just to show you it's just a nice little bundle with different fabrics and trims and pieces that are included and for 15 to $20 for having such a beautiful curated source of fabrics is just amazing. I'm actually going to open this one because these I've actually dug into. You could get one or two of these and it would be the perfect amount to do your snippet rolls and to work with for your artbook. Then I actually have done that with this. I've pulled some of these pieces out of here for maybe my pocket as I was thinking, and then I have a couple of bigger pieces for the cover itself so that I can save all these delicious cuttings for the creative part of the book. So that's what I'm going to recommend you do. Maybe if you want one of these lovely bundles, get the bundle that you think is the most interesting and let it come in, and then go to the fabric store and say, what large piece of fabric can I buy, say half a yard to go with the bundle that I got? Once you get one of these little bundles, there's some ribbon tied around the bundle. This piece right here, which is what I have used, on my inspiration piece was one of these snippets that tied around the bundle. It was like the perfect length to go around my book. Then these also have little lace bits in it, and maybe some crochet or something that was part of who knows what? This lady collects vintage linens and fabrics and This could have been tablecloths, it could have been curtains, it could have been dish cloths, it could have been clothes, it could have been fabric remnants. Look at that. That's really beautiful and she cuts it up. If you're thinking, if you're looking in your closet and you're thinking, I don't know if I could ever cut up my grandmother's table cloth or whatever. This gets you past that. She has already cut things up. They're beautifully laundered, they're all clean when they come to you. I really like things that are three dimensional and fuzzy. You can see now you've got amazing options to use in your scrap. Stuff and your art stuff. Sometimes there's an old piece of paper in there and you didn't have to cut up something that was precious to you. I feel like that gets past the barrier of cutting things up that are still good and useful. Because I even told my friend, I'm like, look how beautiful these are. She's like, Oh, my goodness, I don't think I could cut something up that wasn't yet that was still useful and good. I think a lot of people are going to have that same dilemma if you're looking at beautiful things at the thrift store or something and you're like, I don't know if I can cut that up. This solves that. You can see how much fabric that you get in this little bundle and I paid $16 for this particular little bundle. That's a lot of pretty little options that I can now use and put in my stash of fabrics. You can see how if you're wanting to get into fiber arts, any the decorative snippet rolls, the clusters. Now you can have a really large selection of snips of fabrics and stuff without having to go to the fabric store and buy 100 different bolts of fabric, the quarter yard or whatever a fabric. Which you can certainly do, but I just find this so beautifully curated when you go on C or Ebay and you look for slow stitching kits, Junk journal fabric kits. That's what I was searching for when I came across these options that I've showed you. This is just some more bits. Some of these hand eyes. You can see some of these look like they might have come from the same whatever it was. She was cutting up, but some of these she also hand eyes into these color collections, and I just wanted to give you an idea a few more of these little pieces. I love these, some other ideas, and I've already cut some off of this collection. But you can see how wide the variety is that comes in these. Look at this one. I love this piece of velvet. I love this piece here with these flowers in there. Here's the correct side, but that could be some pretty decoration or trinket. You see how all of these aren't just yards of fabric. These seem to be things that people made or old table cloths or things like that, old handkerchiefs or linens. Super creative in the way that these are curated. This is like a bedding. It's a matlse piece of fabric. Usually that's big bed spreads. I love this one so much. I love the little fuzzy pieces on it. I just wanted to give you a heads up that this resource, and these are about nine inch by nine inch. It's a good sized piece of fabric. This resource is perfect for getting a really varied and interesting different dh of fabrics without investing and having a whole fabric room. Super excited about this option. Another shop I came across when I was hunting. Look at this. It's got this pretty trim on the edge of it. Another option that I found because I also have vintage trims and stuff. These I got at the antique market. Antique market is a great place to look for vintage ribbons. Because if you look for ribbons that are brand new, sometimes they're just not as creative as some of these vintage options, and these were only a couple dollars each. They were not expensive and they come in weird colors and I'm like, Oh, yeah, because there's a booth at my antique market that has some pretty ribbons that just came in. But I also found and I'm going to pull this up on my phone for you. This Etsy shop called Boho tree, B OHO TREE. Now, this is a person out of India, and they are collecting SR ribbons to make the beautiful Sis and things, and the ribbon collection is insane. The prices are crazy good. You're looking at two and $304 a yard for the most decorative, beautiful embroidered trims that you can imagine. I actually didn't appreciate how amazing these were until I got these in and sometimes they do little grab bags. When you see one of these where it's lots of fabrics, ribbons on there, there could be a grab bag option, and I got a 20 random piece, and they also have a 50 random piece. You can see for basically 17, 50, $37 give or take, you can get what I really consider the most amazing collection. These are a good length also. These are about 6 " in length, so it's the very end of a roll, I'm sure, of the yards that they're selling, but even the yards of ribbon are just a couple of dollar a yard. Look how gorgeous these are. These are perfect if you're thinking, what can I do for 6 "? Well, if you are doing the snippet rolls, that could have been a little snip on there, which I've actually done here, I've cut some of that ribbon right here. This is a piece of the ribbon that I've cut down, here's a piece of vintage ribbon. Here's another piece of that sori ribbon. You can see piece of the vintage ribbon. You can see how you can decorate and add some amazing sections into your role as you're collaging the pieces together. If you're doing a book with something more like this, where I ribboned pieces of fabric. If I made the smaller book in this style, I could have easily had these be the ribbon sections of the book. If you loved this enough, you could get a yard of each of the ribbons that you loved and make a ribbon sorry book. These are just so gorgeous and the price was amazing. It was basically in my mind cheaper than going in to the hobby lobby, and the looks that I am getting in these ribbons have made me so excited that I just want to tell everybody about it. I saved it for you guys. I look at these. I like grab bag things. Look at that. You don't know what you're going to get, which is what I like about it. Each time that you're looking, it's it reminded me between looking at the bundles from the 1924 store and these. I reminded me of getting to be able to dig through my grandmother's sewing room and picking out fabrics that I wanted to use for doll clothes. I just love that one. This is what that was. As I was unwrapping each of those curated bundles of fabric, I was getting to oh and and be like, what do I want to make with this or what do I want to make with Pat. This could be a pocket in your book. Some of these are so nice and wide. I like these. I've picked out a couple that I think will go with these fabrics that I have picked out that I think I'm going to use. I'm here with these that I picked out that I thought, those go in there too. I really want a wacky fun and crazy book. But I wanted to tell you about these different sources. You can go to the fabric store, you can get fat quarters, you can get cuts of fabric. You can get lovely curated bundles of fabrics on at C and E bay, Hunt. Slow stitching and hunt junk journal fabric kits. There are people who have already got a big fabric dash and are willing to give us a curated little bundle of pretty things. Then this ribbon source is just amazing. I want you to look around and see what can you pull together for some interesting fabric roles and we're not going to waste one single inch because whatever's left over, we can make little snippets out of little clusters. Then we are going to have fun in class today seeing how we make one of these and what we can do for a book. Alright, so I'll see you back in class. 7. Snippet Roll - Getting Started: In this video, let's start off making some snippet rolls because that's going to then guide how we create our journal after we've finished making our snippets. I've got a couple of ideas. I might work on two snippet rolls at the same time. A snippet roll is basically a long collage of fabric and decorations that you've put on that fabric. It consists of a base fabric. In my case, I'm using just some medium weight cotton muslin. I like it because it's easy to get a hold of. It's the perfect base for something like a snippet roll, and you're not going to really see it when we're done, we're covering it up, but it gives the snippet roll some stability. Snipe means, we can snip this off and use this as some type of decoration in our art journals, whether it be on the cover or inside the book. These can be made of fabric. They can be made of paper, you can make them out of your pretty papers that you have, and you can have a paper base, and then you can glue and put bits of paper and such onto your piece and you can stitch on it if you want, but you don't have to. That's a very creative way to use leftover and cut off pieces of paper that you may have. Don't limit yourself to one or the other and think, Oh, I can't do that because I don't work with fabric. You can work with anything that you want to work with for these. I choose to work with fabric. I am going to do some stitching. If you're going to do stitching, you do want to have some basic sling knowledge. And you can do hand stitching or you can do machine stitching, and I have a big machine. It's a singer machine that I've had for 40 years, and it weighs like 100 pounds. May not weigh 100 pounds literally, but it's like 40 pounds and it lives in the top of the closet because I don't have enough space for a permanent setup. What a pain to have to get out of the sew machine every time I want to do some stitching. I have figured out a solution to that because my machine is very old, heavy and cumbersome. I decided to get into more stitching and such going forward, I have purchased myself a baby sow machine. It's a singer machine also. It's a M 1,000. It weighs like maybe three pounds. It's very heavy. I can put it in a rolling cart and have it sitting next to my table. When I want to use it, I can just pull it out very easily with one hand. I can set it on my table, I can sew, and then I can put it back on the rolling cart and now I have just a small machine that can do some lightweight art sewing. Things in my art journal, pieces of art that maybe I want to do some stitching on. Now that's a much easier solution than having a great big machine set up all the time since I'm obviously not going to get mine out of the closet every few minutes because it's a pain. Anytime that you've got something that you're like, Okay, I want to do this, but what's holding me back? What is the solution that you can do that gets you past that hurdle? For me, it was a sw machine that was portable and much easier to handle. I will be using that little baby sw machine and it basically does a straight stitch and a zig zag, which for stuff like this is all I need. Because once I get the fabrics all tacked onto a strip, and I'm going to show you a cheat here for making a bigger strip and then cutting it down to make this size. Once I get everything tacked down, then I can just sew a couple of lines in there to make sure it really stays because you can use some different things to tack it down and some things are going to work better than others. If you just are very ant sewing, you could use a fabric glue. I like this lens line's fabric fusion, which is a permanent fabric adhesive. If you're going to try the glue, do some samples before you really get in there so you can see the flow and if it's going to soak through your fabric and what that's going to look like. But I like using a good quality fabric glue if you're going to glue these on in that way, as you're snipping pieces off later, they're going to stay stuck. The other glue that I really like is the acid free tacky glue by lens, and it's good for paper. It's good for embellishments on top if I'm doing hard surfaces to the fabric. That's what I used to glue these buttons down. But you can also do hand stitching and hand slow the button down. You could do hand stitching if you don't want to machine stitch. You can slow stitch and Attach everything with a needle and thread. You've got so many choices. Don't get hung up on if you don't have a machine or if you don't want to use fabric, you can use paper, you can use glue, you can make these anyway that you want. The reason why it's called a roll is because then it's nice and long and you've got lots of variations. Then you can roll it up on a spool. If you have an antique spool, those are pretty, you can just roll it up if you want and tie it with a piece of ribbon and just have that sitting out. These can be decoration for your house. You can put them in your art room and save them for different craft projects and things like an art journal, which is what I choose to do with these. My original journal, I used the snippet roll on the spine here, and I actually used it here coming down the front, and I could have put it over a little further if I wanted to see more of the role because then I put a pocket on top and I slipped stuff in the pocket, and I can have that pocket for a piece of art if I want. I've also used snippet rolls inside of a fabric journal that we created in the last bookshop. These are really cool because this one's a nice messy snippet off the end of the piece that I created for the cover. Now we can slip in pins and things that we want to use and be able to carry with us. We can just slip those in and I absolutely love how that looks as a pinhol you can see how you can use those inside as well as for like a cover. I was thinking, that art journal is all fabric and this one is fabric covering a hard surface. I like this journal because it's beautiful and it is flexible and you can lay them open. The thing I don't like about them and look, here's another piece of a snippet that I've saved inside. What I don't love about them is they have a gap in between the signatures, and so you can certainly do the snippet rolls, do this type of journal. You can check out my last book workshop. On making the fabric covers like that. This one's going to be different. I'm going to do these with a hard cover and a hard edge and I like it because then we have the signatures that meet up and you don't have the gap, and then I've added washi tape in there just as an extra yummy decoration because I thought, Oh, how fun is that because sometimes you'll see the glue that glues these together and that's a nice way to prevent that, but I like how these just continue on as a book. That's where I'm going with my snippet roles today, but I've got some new ideas. So that's what a snippet role is. It is a role collage, decorated and ready to then decorate the books that we create. I've got a couple of different color ways and ideas that I've come up with for these and you can do them all in paper. I'm choosing to do fabric today. But I really loved So fabric I found at the fabric store, which was this fabric here. I thought, I would love for that to somehow be a cover. Then I thought, let's do a funky book and do the front cover in one fabric, the back cover in a different fabric. Then I had this is a flannel. It's just a coordinating fabric that I might use in my snippet roll. Then from the fabric resources? I told you about the online kits that you can look for and order slow stitching kits and art journal, fabric kits, where they have all these Yumi bits and decorations and pieces. I pulled a few fabrics out of those and thought, here's where I wanted to go with that and a pocket on the front maybe. Then I thought, Okay, what snip items could possibly match that. I liked these burgundy fabrics and the differences and all of the options that are included here with this yummy little kit. I thought what I would do was use these fabrics and such as the snippet part. Now that I'm looking at them, I'm almost thinking should we do this orange is the back cover, and then this in the snippet. I'm saying that because some of these if it's on the spine, This is on the spine. Is that going to here we like the spine? If I do it on the spine, is it going to be enough contrast and look good next to this leaf thing or I'm going to have to think on that for a second. While I think on that, I can use some of this in the snippet. We haven't glued the cover together yet. Then we can pick and choose as we get to it. But these are the fabrics that I'm thinking in the snippet roll because I like how it pulls out this pretty burgundy out of our main piece? This was a slow stitch kit from the 1924 shop I shared with you on EtS. I just like the variety and how different everything looks. So that's what I'm going to use today. Then I've got a couple of those sorry ribbons that can be decoration on top and I'll pull some stuff out as we go. Also have these pretty fabrics. This could be the back of that. That would be really cool too. I got choices for and this would be really different, but I don't think it's the same style. I'm just picking and choosing and deciding on what are some of my options and then I'm going to pull maybe some different bits and stuff for decorations as we're going. But that's where I'm going on this art journal. That's some choices that I'm thinking and molling out. The other art journal, the second snippet role I want to be creating. I think I want to do it based on this inspiration. I really loved. It's an unusual color palette for me. It's not one I would normally pick this pink and green. But the older I get, the more I actually like pink, and I normally pink and ochre. But this kit was a pink and green kit, and then I've pulled some other stuff in here too. But look at all of these yummy bits and pieces. Then I had a piece of fabric here that I think was a Tim Holtz fabric. From his little fat quarters fabric collection, and I loved it. I'm almost thinking, what do you think about this for the back cover because it pulls all these in. Even thinking about maybe a dark blue satin ribbon to pull out these naves. I've got some dark blue, I'll pull it out in a bit. Then some of these can be some of the decorations on top. I was almost thinking wide snippet roll for the cover and somehow use all of this or part of this as the cover and the snippet rolls are long. We'll only be using a little portion of the snippet roll and then we can actually make the rest of it into the actual snippet roll. But I'm thinking that the second one might be something fun and funky like this. I could have some of these still tying in so it's not left down the back as an odd ball. That's where I think I'm going with the two snippet rolls today. So I'll just have to make sure I save enough for a cover on that. I like how on this particular one, this is the book we made yesterday without a cover. I like how some of these colors that I put in here coordinate with those covers options. I love that. Okay, to do the snippet roll. I'm using muslin fabric. This is like my little cheat that I discovered. You could take us a long skinny piece of fabric, like a long skinny piece of muslin, and you could decide, how long do I want it and you could tear that if you want that to be your snippet roll. For instance, if I want this to be like here, I could snip it, and then I can tear it as the length of whatever that I want to make and I love muslin because it does tear like that. Then here we have, however long this was, a nice snippet roll itself. Hopefully, because it usually tears straight, it tears along a line. Hopefully it was straight to begin with, but that actually looks a little crooked, but I'm not even worried about it. I like the fraight edges. That's why I like to tear the fabric rather than cut it sometimes, but I will be cutting my other cheat. For something like this, I would probably use some glue. And fabric bits, and I would glue each one to here to just tack it down. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to have a wider piece of fabric, and I think this is, let me grab a ruler. Hang on. 9 " by whatever the width was. 18 1920 21.5 inch. When I'm done with it'll be about 42 " or even longer because I'm thinking for the snippet role that there's three or four width side of here depending on how wide I decide I want that role to be when we're done. I want it to be a nice size. I don't want it to be so wide that I can't use my kit though because these only come in a certain size. I'm keeping that in mind also. Then you'll notice there is a paper on this muslin fabric. I didn't even bother iron in it doesn't matter. It's the back side. Then this is my little cheat and you will need an iron for this part if you choose to do it this way, otherwise, consider a glue stick to glue pieces down, or you can just pin them with pins if you're in a sewing frame and you want to just pin everything down and sew it. You can do that too. But this is my easy cheat for getting it tacked down. This is heat and bond, light, slable, iron on adhesive. Basically, what it is is it's paper with these little dots on the back and you glue that down to the piece of fabric, glue, iron it down to the piece of fabric with a very hot iron. I had the iron all the way up and let it warm up for a bit, and then I just heated that paper right on to my fabric, and then what you can do after you've got it set and cool. You wanted to say sable because if you don't get the one that says sable, Then it gums up your sow machine needle and stuff, you might not be able to easily sew through it. Heat and bond, but it's got to be the swable one. There are several different kinds out there. Once you've got that on there, you're now ready to just peel this fabric off and you can see it's shiny on here, and that's the blue, and what we can do now is, and I cut it down to the size I was working with here. But what we can do now, get this paper out of the way is, we can play and arrange and decide how we want to have our fabrics on our piece. Because this is the base layer. We'll consider this the back layer. We'll consider these fabrics, the base layer, and then once we've got all that attached, then anything that we put on top of that, whether it be buttons or ribbons or, decorative pieces that I'll pull out a bunch of stuff out of my drawers to show you other stuff that we could add, but we could add does, we could add little cut pieces that we cut off something. You can really be creative on the stuff that you add decorations like this. We can we'll get to that. This will be the fabric layer. I don't want big fat layers like this. I know that I'm going to be using this as stripes. I want to stripe it out and because I'm using this kid of coordinated pieces, basically, I'm going to cut this into strips. They don't have to be the same size. They don't have to be straight. They are simply going to be different elements of my layers. Then once we got it placed where we think we like it, then we are going to iron those pieces down to get them tacked really good. And then we'll be ready to decorate it. This is the first one that I'm going to do. If it's a piece like this where it's see through. That might be something I consider laying on the top layer, so I might save that for the next layer. If it's a piece like a piece of ribbon that I definitely want to be on the top layer, I'm going to save those pieces for maybe something on top. Then this is nice. What I really like about these kits is if you are hesitant to cut up something good because these are vintage linens, they're not regular fabrics. If you're hesitant to cut up a table cloth or something that you consider still usable and good, what I love about these is they're already cut up for you and then you don't have that dilemma. You can just use whatever yummy goodies come. But if you've got a big swings and you're like, I'm going to use what I've got, then go for it. I'm just giving you some options and things to think about as you're going. If you don't want to cut stuff up and you can definitely get it from the fabric store, like a quarter yard, half yard of fabric, or you can order kits where they're coordinated for you already. I just want a little bit of each fabric touching the b. They don't have to be completely touching. Yes, I love these. Once that glue attaches that fabric and stuff, it disappears. That's basically see through. Let's see what we got here. I also want to use some of this one in there. I've got quite a bit of this fabric. I bought half a yard, and I'm definitely glad I bought the extra yardage because that gave me the opportunity to have choices and to be able to use this for a snippet and then I can still plenty for a cover or some other project. If you have a bunch of runoff pieces, it's better even if you use all of those like the pieces that you've already cut off and used in other projects, but for this, I didn't really have that. If you have a piece like this and maybe it's not long enough for your piece and this I am very deliberately trying to get to the edges. I want to overlap the edges and have enough to maybe wrap a book, which I'm real tight on size. If I grab one of my covers here, I'm real tight on the size, and I almost maybe should have even left another half an inch, but I'm trying to definitely give myself enough space where I could wrap it if I want, and that could be the first part of the snippet roll and the rest can be regular snippet roll, I might not end up with too much leftover, but I'll definitely still have some to play with. I really love love fabrics like this. What I have discovered on this heat and bond is super thick fabrics with hanely buttons and things like that. They do not adhere very well to the heat and bond because I don't think it can just get hot enough through the iron. This piece it's not long enough anyway. It might be a better top piece for our snippet roll here. This is a fat quarter from the fabric store, and a fat quarter is a quarter of a yard, but it's cut this would be like a normal quarter of a yard and it would be double the length. The rest of it will be longer. But what they've done is taken half the bolt so they can make this quarter of a yard fatter. You have a whole lot more fabric space to work in rather than just this half length that was longer. I like fat quarters for this reason because now you have a whole bunch of stuff that you can play in and experiment in, especially if you do quilting, this is a thing that a lot of quilters use, then they've got a lot of fabric space to then be able to work with. I'm thinking. I was just sizing that out to the back of there even though I like that, and I'm not going to do it on the back, but I did want maybe it's one of these stripes in here. Thought that would be good. I'm not tacking anything down yet. I'm still giving myself the opportunity to rearrange and move stuff around. That's why everything is still mobile. Then I might want to have that underneath. You could cover different edges that way. You could stack them a little differently. That's why I'm still giving myself some options instead of tacking it all down immediately. I really want there to be just a huge variation of prettiness. I like this yellow also. I pulled that out as an option. It's another fat quarter from the fabric store. I could tear this. Let's just see what a tear would be. Let's just pick a size and tear it because it's a cotton, and then we'll have a fraight edge and I like fraight edges. Then I could go ahead and tear this other side and have two freight edges. That would be pretty. And then save this, that can be a snippet somewhere else. That can be something that we put further down. It could be just like a little piece that we've got in here. I just thinking out loud here, moving stuff around. I think I want a big fatter piece of that yellow. I really liked it. I'm going to tear another piece off here. I'm getting close. We're getting close here. I'm thinking. Let me just make sure you can see all of it. What I'm thinking was, it would be nice to include some pretty little velvet ribbons in here. I cut a few pieces of ribbon off of my ribbon spools. I was already maybe considering this deep blue for the spine because I've done a ribbon on a spine on another book and I loved it. This could maybe be the back or the front. I could actually do this as the front and the solid as the back. That could be an option. I'm just keeping my options open here. Still think this might possibly be the spine, but I wanted to keep some options open. I've got this pretty yellow can go in here and you see I'm down to the very last bits here that I'm trying to fill in. I actually wanted the other one to be the ribbon front, I'm going to cut this wire off of this ribbon because I don't need that wire to be there as I'm sewing this in my sewing machine. I'm just cutting these wire edges off, and then I'm going to cut it in half, I think and we'll use the half in two different places. You can see even as you're creating it, you might have something in mind, and then you might think, wait a minute, what if I did this or that instead. Now I'm just going to cut this in half. Keeping options open. That's what I like to call that. Keeping our options open because I'll have to decide that pretty soon though, but I think the other book is the one I really wanted to make the cover, we'll see. We will see. Now I've got a few ribbon bits in here. Maybe all. I like that that's overlapping with that little fuzz bit. Maybe I'll actually move this down. That's why I don't attach them yet because as you're getting in your last little bits and new little ideas come to you, you want the option to still be able to move things maybe around a little bit. Again, I'm just trying to leave enough under here that it grabs the fabric, not necessarily covers the whole fabric so that it tacks it down for me to sew it on my sewing machine. That's probably not going to fit as well there. Probably should have left that right there. What if I do that right there? Maybe the orange here. There's a little pop coming out from that buzz. It's real skinny. I've got a lot there we go a lot of room to play in there. I want to get it tacked down where there's no gaps. I still have a gap at the end there. We'll come back to that in a second. Maybe I'll do that one, so it's a tiny bit different. Then I think one more piece for that other end. I still have some glue showing down here. I just want that to shine through a little bit. Feeling. Feeling good about that. I need one more thing at the end and then I think I'll be good. What I want to put down there. How about this piece since I have it? This is a piece of the ribbon that came that wrapped up one of these bundles. I'm just going to cut the wrinkle ends off of here. There we go. Okay. Now we are ready to iron these. You want your iron all the way up on as hot as you can get. So I'm going to let that heat up a bit, and I'll be right back. 8. Snippet Roll - Assembling: All right. My iron has been heating up for a bit, so I think we are ready to iron these down. Any last little adjusting that you need to do, get that out of the way. Make sure you've no don't have any little gaps left. But if you do end up with a gap, don't worry about it because in the end, we're going to be putting even more stuff, say on top of these. I've just put this on the hottest setting, and I'm just leaving it on the fabric long enough for it to get hot and it's got to get hot enough. That it goes down through the fabric and heats up that glue enough to grab the fabric. It's not like we're just and we're done. We're actually going to have to let the iron sit on the fabric for a bit. That's a good lesson in picking fabrics, too. If you pick fabrics that say, never iron this fabric for whatever reason because maybe it's plastic and it'll melt. This will definitely probably melt that. You just got to be careful and Who knows, I might not get it on there enough, but I'm just trying to tack these down. I'm not trying to glue them down at this point. If you're doing the glue method, use a glue and glue it really well. Then you got to let that cool a little bit and then we can see what we didn't get attached. L S, now this ribbon might have been a bad choice as I am shrinking it up there somehow. But it could be interesting texture, but now we know if that's going to bug you, you need to go ahead and pull that up before it's really attached. It's my point there. It's actually not wanting to attach, but I do like the texture. I might just have to pin that one down. But I do like the wrinkle it's creating, and that could be because it's got metal thread in there, maybe pulling up because of that. We'll pin that one down. The velvet ones just might not stick. It might be too thick, I may be pinning those down, which is why I like sewing stuff rather than relying on its sticking by itself because some stuff just does not cooperate. That one. Good deal. I'm not sing it all around. I'm not trying to get wrinkles out. I'm just trying to heat the glue up underneath it, so I'm letting it sit for a moment, not long enough to burn anything, but definitely long enough to hopefully mount the glue to tack this down. I might have to just replace this yellow one. It's not cooperating. I like that yellow one though. Be careful if you've got a spot where you on, if you've got a spot open like that, don't set your iron back on that because that glue stuff gets on the iron plate. You don't want that. Makes a mess. But I feel like that little yellow ribbon is just not going to hold up for what we need here. Let's see. Besides the yellow, do we get them all down? I want to go iron that right there, but I don't want the iron to touch the stuff. Let's just see if we've got something else that we can put there. I've found another fabric that's like a little beehive, a little honeycomb, it's the right yellows, and it's a different pattern than the rest of what I've got going on in here. I think I'm going to use that. I wanted it to be a gold there. I had pulled that out and considered it before. And then put it back, but now that this ribbon here didn't really work as that particular layer. It doesn't mean that we can't use it on a top layer though. Let's keep that in mind. We can definitely use that on a layer on top. Now I've already melted that glue, so this might not stick. But this could be something on top, could be a decoration that we add to the top of it. It's not ruined, and I like all the extra texture. I don't think that's going to stay down. What I'm going to do before I go any further is I'm going to sew these I could go. I could go ahead and pin that. Because this is the one that I actually don't want to use on the whole cover as I could do a little glue stick there. Let's do a little glue stick actually. Because this is the one that I actually want to be a true snippet piece, not the cover. I'm just going to go and we can cut these and sew this. I'm just going to use a little glue on the back just to glue that, just to tack it down. And that would be fine. That would help. That would help. Here we go. You could use the hu on the whole thing. This is exactly how I would do that if I were tacking this down with the glue instead of the iron stuff. Just tack it down. Just tack it down. There we all stuck. Mostly. We've got a piece right here. Let's tack it down. It might be easier just to use a glue stick. But I like it because you could get everything placed and then iron it down. I do like that aspect of that. All right. Let's see if we've got it where we can trim it. What I would do, let me move my ironing board here, I have a little baby ironing board. I'm going to get out my cutting mat. And I'm going to use a rotary cutter because easier, you don't have to you don't have to do that. But what I'm going to do is, I think I made this was it 9 ". Let me glue this here. Again, this is just to tack it down. This is not a permanent adhesion for me. I'm going to sew it. You definitely need to do a little better job if you're actually going to use it. There's that and that and what do we got here? I could I made 9 ". I could basically get this on the side. Actually I might just flip it over. Then I can make sure I'm just trimming this. This is not the rotary cutter, that's my box cutter, this is my rotary cutter. Now, I can trim this all the way down and I should have three equal sections. It's close. Let's trim this down. I like a road re cutter because very easy, an awkward angle. Yeah, I'm going to turn this long enough for me to cut it. I got a bunch of stuff on the table, Burr. The third one may be a tiny bit skinnier. Let me see. Is that exactly nine? Let me just make sure. Well, it's nine and it's a smidge under nine. I want to maybe cut this Midge smaller so that they're all three in the end close. And I felt that move by the time I got to this end. That's okay, though. We're just trying to get close. I don't have to be perfect. Because it's a snippy role. They're meant to be messy, they're meant to be leftover bits. They don't have to be perfect. And you could, if you wanted, leave all these raggedy edges, but I'm going to go ahead and trim off my raggedy edges. Then save all these bits. All these bits can be in your clusters. I don't throw anything away. What do I got going on here? Something didn't stay stuck. We'll save that until I find it. That could be a piece I cut off. It went right there. Right there, we're missing that one. If you have one come off, just use a little glue stick and tack it on before you're past it. Here we go. Easy fix. Here we go. This is the beginning of our snippet roll. Look how pretty that is. I mean, it's pretty just like that. All right, I'm going to cut another one of those. Then we'll cut the edges off this last one. There we go. At piece left. Did anything fall off? Good deal. Two of those, now we'll cut these bits off here and again, save all of. They are going to be great for things like s. If you've got a little messy overhang or anything like that, those don't bother me a bit. I like the little messiness on a roll. I even like it if you just start with a piece of muslin on this side and everything hangs off, which I didn't choose to do on this, but I do like the little bit of messiness on a snippet roll. Everything still stuck. Then I've got an area here where I didn't cover the muslin, but that's okay because we still have our decorations that we can do on the top. Now we have three pieces of our snippet roll, which we will then attach. Now I'm going to first, I left a little space. I'm going to sew this to this one, and then I'm going to sew this to this one. Then I may have a little piece here that I just might trim off. Then we have a very long lovely snippet roll that we can use for a lot of stuff. Let me get my saw machine out and I'll be right back. I've got the little sewing machine setup. This already had a gold thread on it that was perfect for what I'm doing here. I decided not to change the thread and it's already on there and ready to go. Basically, all I'm going to do, I've made sure that this is on let's do like a little zigzag stitch, and I'm going to just sew all three of these to each other at the end here. And I could pin it. Then I got to take the pins right back out. I got it lined up. I've got my foot pedal down here. I do have a button here to back up, so I'm going to sew a little back up a little to really lock that thread in and then just do a straight stitch all the way across. Now I'll lift that foot and trim that piece. Hopefully I did that straight. Look at that, straight enough. Straight enough for a little collage role. Could just pin this a little bit right there in the middle. Let me grab a pin. That way, it's not actually in my way, but it can help me keep it straight. I'm sitting at a weird angle so that I could have the camera close to the machine for you. But let me get it started here. All right. Super fun. I do have a little bit of my muzzlin showing through underneath this ribbon. What I'll probably do in a minute is just go back and trim that underneath. But you don't have to. Then I am going to sew down and you could do on the end or you could do middle and on the end, but I want to make sure all these fabric bits even as we cut it up to do other things. I have a piece of yellow here. Did that fall back off? Yes, it did. I'll tack this down. Actually, I'll just wait till I get to it. I may start. I think I'll just do a straight stitch. I'm just going to move this over to a straight, get right on the edge there. Maybe right there. I'm just making sure that I hold each piece down. I'm not trying to get my finger in the way of the needle, but I don't want some of these to pull over and so a weird angle. I'm just making sure that they're all flat down. Then I can decide, do I need a third one, or did I cover enough that even when I snip these, it's not going to matter. I think I've covered enough, so I don't think I'm going to do a third one on this one. Now we have a long strip ready for to decor. I'm going to move my machine and pull out lots of yummy goodies and we'll start decorating this. 10. Sewn Binding With Signatures: This video, I'm going to do a refresher on how we make our signatures and so that if you've already watched one of my other bookwork shops, you'll have seen this and you'll already know what we're doing and you could skip along to the next sections if you want. But basically what I've done is I have picked out the different papers that I wanted to include in this book. I've used a variety of coal press and hot press arches paper. In this ten by 14 inch size. I wanted it to be a mix of papers. You can make it all be the same paper. It was basically four watercolor papers. I have one here on the top. I have a handmade paper, so I cut a variety of the handmade papers in the same size, and I varied up the order of the different pages in here, but I basically tell you have a hot press paper, a handmade paper, a cold press paper. This is another cold press paper. Because that's my favorite to work on. Whatever your favorite to work on is, you might include more of those pages, and then I had a handmade paper in here, and then I had a second hot press paper. You could have two pads of paper. You could pull the different pieces together into however many sheets you want in each signature. That was four papers and two handmade papers for six different papers. They're all cut out to the same size. I varied each section, so I had two handmade papers in this. Then the next section, I did two different handmade papers just because I wanted the variety and I have the papers on hand. You could do the exact same set of papers in all four sections, if you want, I'm doing four sections. Once you get all your papers together and everything that you want to include in here, that could also include pieces of art that you've already made. It could include vintage paper that you have if you're going to make more of a junk journal style. It can be anything that you want to have in these pages. Once you get all of that pulled together, cut and organized into about the same size. Then we fold those in half and I fold those in half all together so that they all match when I go to punch the whole and I don't have a problem with them telescoping out. But you can do that anyway that you want. A lot of people have already made a lot of books and maybe you've got a different method. But this is what I do, and I fold them all in half. Let's go ahead and grab the next section. If I've got anything that stands out from the page, I need to make sure that I go ahead and pull that in and make it even. Even if it sticks out, it's at least sticking out evenly and fold my second section. This is what the bone folder is for. It's to help you really get a nice pressed edge. I'm standing up when I make these so I can really put all my weight down on that. And again, making sure everything is all in. And I'm not looking for perfection here. I'm not trying to make a book where everything is lined up exact. I want it to be beautiful, but I don't have to be perfect. That's just not the goal of an art book for me. I want to see the variations in paper depths, which is why I use handmade papers and decod edge papers and just different things like that. If I have an edge that's not perfect, I don't care. I concentr it, and then it's on purpose that it wasn't perfect. I like that some stick out and some don't. I like that some might have hand torn edges and some don't. I like all that variety. Okay. Now, once we've got all four of those pressed, I take a pencil and I mark which order these are going to be in. I might look at these and decide that I want to have what I've done is made two sections the same and then these other two sections, the same. I can tell by the papers sticking out. These two sections were the same. I basically used two different handmade papers and four watercolor papers, and then two more different handmade papers and four watercolor papers. I had two watercolor pads and I had some extra paper leftover on those pads to do something else with, and I had four sheets of handmade paper that I have chosen to put in these. Here's that one. And this purple one, and in this one, I had that burgundy and that one with the doodles. The doodle paper on the back side of the doodle paper, you can do something else, collage, a pocket, a drawing, whatever, you can just so this paper and paint on it, and the eso will protect it from soaking through. I just need to decide, do I want to vary them up in the same way. I'm going to go one, the other one, the other in mine. Then I'm going to very lightly put a little number on the bottom of these because I need them to stay when we're done, I need them to stay in order. Is that way all the punch holes will line up. As I'm sewing, I won't get confused and flip something around in a way that I didn't intend. That's why I do that. Now, let's use our signature punch. The signature punch is super cool. Normally what we would do, just to show you both ways if you didn't watch one of my other classes, normally what we would do. We would fold this back. We would take a ruler and we would mark each spot that we want to hole. For this size, I want one in the middle. I want one on each end, and then I want a hole in the middle of those. I've got one here, one here, one here, one here, one here. I'm going to measure that out and with a pencil mark that hole and draw that hole on all signatures because I'm going to do each one the exact same. Then I'm going to take my bone folder after I've got those marked and push it through at an angle and try to get it through this angle without coming through on the paper itself, trying to hit the angle, and sometimes you're right on and sometimes you're not. That's the way that you'll see most people do the signature. I am, however, going to show you the new signature tool. Now, I think these are centimeters, I think that's what these are marked as, because this is an odd number of centimeters, it's 41 ", I'm going to pretend that It's not a weird size because I can't go now at 20.5 to get it in the middle. I need to go 21 or 22. I'm going to pick 20 to be the center of this height because I just easier, math wise and hole wise to do. Then I can go 71420, 27 34 and that'll center everything just a centimeter this way a little bit, but that's fine. I'm okay with that as long as they're even, and in the end, we end up with five holes. That's how I figured that. I'm figure 14 21, but because I don't want to be too far down here, I want it to be centered, I picked 20. And then I still want those to match the other holes that I've done. 27 and then 34 would be the same lengths. You can't even tell really that we're a centimeter off at the bottom, and that's how I decided to do those. Then once you get that in there, now you can just make that hole a little bit bigger because you need it a tiny bigger than just the tip of the all. But look how much easier it is just to come through and you're right there on that, and it took me no time at all. Because I wasn't bending the the paper backwards and then back forwards when I was done punching holes, they don't get off. W when you've got them folded backwards and then you fold them forward again, the holes get off a little bit, no matter how you try to do it, it just does. I'm like, this is the way to do it. I need to make sure that I'm putting them all in the same direction, which is why I like that number on there, and then put a thing back on here where I can see all the numbers, make sure we're tapped here at the end, then again, I'm going 714, we're in half at 20:27 and 34. Then I can just go ahead and make those holes bigger. You see, I don't know if you've done enough at the other direction, but man, so much faster and easier. I don't end up with holes on the side of the page because I have a few books where the holes are at the side of the page. I just is what it is, and you can collage over it and you can you can cover it up. It's not a big deal, but what if you didn't have to worry about it? 714-20-2734. And then I'm just going to make those bigger. I'm still being careful to go in at a 45 degree angle because I want to make sure I'm hitting that spine and if you don't go in at that angle, you mess up. There we go. Let's do number four. There we go. If you have seen one of the other bookworshops, you'll be able to see how much faster that actually was and how much more pie telling you. Is. All right. Now we got all four of those punched up in our handed ended punch. And let's pick a fun thread. I'm feeling like maybe this orange and because we're going to sew this together, and I need a needle. I need to see where did I put the needles right here on the desk. And let's see where that's coming in at. There we go and get that started. I have decided now after making 15 books. That the easiest way. I was doing like a length. On the other workshops, you'll see I was doing like a length and then maybe we have to tie it off somewhere in the middle of it. Have decided, put some on the thread and then out enough thread for however many signatures that you have. If I got four signatures, I pull out four links, maybe a tiny bit of extra. Just to give myself some extra. That's how I determine the length now. And just line these back up. I'm going to start on one end if your you don't get them out of order, you should be able to just push that needle right through all the layers. I just got it out of order because I let them all move, but it'll just push right through to there. I'm going to so leaving, have also decided that I like to have the thread on the outside and I tie it off on the outside rather than the inside. That might be a tiny bit different than the way you've seen me do it before, but I'm going to go back up through that hole there. Now I've got the tail hanging out and I've got the thread there. I'm just zooming in a little bit for you. I've got the thread hanging out here and I've got the next piece coming through there and I'm just pulling them so that we've got the piece inside. Then I'm going right up through the third hole and you can see there's my needle. Let me tell you, that little punch lining everything up has just made it super easy up through the next hole and just pull it all through. I'm not pulling so tight that I'm pulling this yet. Then through the fourth hole. Then we're going to come back around, and I'm come right back through the hole we just came out of right there. We're just zig zagging our way back down our piece now, and then pull it tu and then through that hole here. There we go. I'm being careful not to snag my needle in the middle of that piece of thread. If you do that, you need to pull it back out. You don't want that catching that thread. There's that. I can pull that tau. Actually come back through this hole here and I'm going to loop it and make a nod on the inside and pull it back out and not on the outside. But that keeps my needle. That thread hanging on the outside a little bit better, which I like because you're not going to see it anyway when we're done. So I don't worry about it. I'm going to pull these taut. Make sure I don't have any weird extra leftover pieces. I'm going to go ahead and just pull all these and get them nice and firm. I don't have some great big weird bubble or loop, and just going to double knot it here on the inside. I'm just making a knot and pulling it. I'm going to double that. It's going to have a little knot there at the bottom, which then we make a pull to the other side. We might be able to just pull that through, but I'm not really worried about it. I just didn't want a big long piece of thread hanging out, and then I'm putting the needle right back through to the outside. That's going to keep everything tight so I can just tie this off here on the outside. Don't cut this off. I think in one of the workshops, I cut it off, but then I show you how to fix that by just tying another piece back on. But I'm just ridiculous. Sometimes I just start talking and going and cut off a piece of thread. I'm like, Oh, I need to trim that, but no, do not cut that off. Just tie it on there. There I've got that tied on there. Now this is why I number them because I move them all the way around. Now I've got signature number two, and I want number two to be right behind number one. This is how we're going to attach each signature to itself. I'm going to take the piece that I already had. I might cut this little shorter. I'm going to take the piece that already had. I'm going to go right into the first hole of the second signature, and this is how we attach each signature. You see if I had it closed and push the needle through, it came right through the middle, telling you. I love how easy that little signature maker has made me punching holes and not fighting with the books. I went right up through the second hole and now I'm going to attach this by going through the thread here on this side, and then coming back through the thread here on this side. I'm creating a loop around that piece of thread there, and we have now attached the first signature to the second signature. I'm going right back through hole number two. I'm going to go up through hole number three. Let me get that in. There we go. Perfect. Now we'll come back through right here. I'm going to pull it tall, make sure it's not all loose and walky and go right through that third hole and I'm going to do the exact same thing I just did. I'm going to come right through this side, and I'm going to come right through this side. I have decided that as far as looping, I like to go the way I'm traveling. When I'm coming back down the next side, I'll loop it the way I'm traveling. I have found that it makes a prettier loop and you don't get a little tangles in the thread. That'll make sense as you're making them and then just pull that now you got two pretty little loops there, back through the next hole, perfect and I'm going to just loop it through one side and back through the other side, perfect. Come right back through that hole. And I lost the whole hang on. There we go. And again, I'm pulling it tight, but you can't pull it so tight that you make these super duper tight. So you don't want to have weird loose loops here, but you don't want it so tight that this no longer shuts correctly. Back through this hole, Hang on, I caught on the corner. And then I'm going to loop around that first one. Now, we are ready for number three. Let's see, I got the one is down here. The two should be down there, and I want the three down there. You can see how important it is to number these, you get all discombobulated as you're going. Now I'm going through the first hole down here, I might have got them out of order, hang on. I have to find where we're at here. There we go. I went through the first hole down there and I'm going to pull that through. Pull it nice and tight, come back up through the second hole. Perfect. Now, you can see, I've got this little bit longer loop on that first one, we're going to get that fixed in. Now I don't go through this here like I did the first time. No. Now I go through the loop right here between Section one and two. Now that's where we're looping in for the second set. Then right back down through that hole. Perfect. Here we go. Pull it nice and B up through the third hole. Again, pulling it nice and ta. Now you can pull it ta, but I like doing it like here because you're not pulling everything so tight that your book is not even going to want to open and close. I want to pull that first one a little bit. There we go. There we go. I wanted this one to be a tiny bit tighter. In the end, it's not going to matter. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're going to be gluing the binding, and then I do an extra with the With the book bind tape. But as close as you can get, again, back through that center part, pull that through and make the next loop and then back through that to the center. There we go. Pull it talk through the next hole. Here we go. Again, you see I said, I like to do the loops the way I'm traveling. Now I'm coming through this way since I'm traveling this way, I've decided that's what I like the best personally. Some of that stuff you're just going to figure out as you're making. You're going to be like, I just pulled off my needle hang on. Some of that you're just going to figure out. All right. Hey needles on the floor. Let me just grab another needle. I like the longer needles. I want the long long one. Short needles are not good for all of this. My fingers are too clumsy. Let's go right back in. I just pulled it right on out. Where are we at? Here we go. Straight through, that should have perfect. And then back out the last hole perfect. I caught it on the paper again. I like to catch the edges. Again, just loop it through the way I was going and ready for number four. M number one is at the bottom. I need my number four to be at the bottom. You can see how you can get them confused if you don't go ahead and mark them. Right here. I'm just going right hole number one in the fourth section. There we go. It is right where it's supposed to be. Right back out. Here we go. Again, I like to loop it the way I'm traveling, so I'm going to loop it the way I'm going right there. Sometimes it's not so easy to loop up under that piece of thread, which is what the little round book needles are good for. I'm having extra good luck today, so straight needle is working fine. Find the center here. Yes. I think I caught that thread, so I can see that I caught the thread, and I want to back out before I finish because I actually don't want to completely catch that thread. Let me pull this tight again. If you catch the thread, then it just snags up and I don't want it to snag up. Trying to avoid the snag. Now we're going to go right back in whole number three, and loop up underneath that 2-3, nice little loop there. I can see I've gotten loose now that I've been all over the place so I can pull those tight here in the center by just opening it up, pulling them a little tighter, pulling it tight and then making sure I didn't make it too. There we go. Then we're just going to go back out the next hole. In between that loop 2-3 back in the center. And then back out number four, trying not to lose my needle. Again, we're getting shorter and shorter. Now I'm going to loop through this side right here and I'm going to knot that off. At this point, I'm actually going to do an extra loop there to make sure I stay tight, and then I'm going to loop it and loop that to make the knot. I'm actually going to double not it. It's just how I always not stuff. Then we can cut this off and now our book is attached. What we do now, I'm going to show you this fun. What you do now, and I'm going to take this lovely book. Press, and I just hold it down so that it's firm and you don't have to get it don't have to be too hard about it, just press it down and tighten it and we are ready to glue it. What I do is I take the lens glue. Acid free tacky glue, and I'm going to run a bed down all four edges here. I do want to take the time to make sure this is even because I can see now that this one number three dips down. I do want to take the time before I start gluing to make sure that I've got it even and exactly where I want it because once we glue it, those are going to be forever where they're at. Make sure they're even, they're lined up. You don't have one dipping in where the others are not. And then go ahead and press it down. The other way that we do this, which I've done in all the other workshops, is I use clamps. The other way that I do this because I'm using thicker papers and I'm not too worried about damaging this surface because I actually glue this down to my book cover, but to keep it not damaging, if you've got some paint sticks, this would be an excellent cheat for doing these. I take some nice heavy duty clamps like you get from the hardware store, and I use the clamps in place of where I'm putting that. This would work the same way to paint sticks and two big clamps if you've got that and the paint stick will protect your page from the clamp bite. It'll also keep it a little more even pressed throughout. That's a nice way to do it. That's basically the way I was doing it in the other workshops that I did, but we're going to test out here our Yummy book press, and you can see the book is nice and thick, so it stays up for us. I'm going to use the tacky glue. That's the one that I have decided that I like the best. Basically, I run as nice and even as I can, beat to glue down these edges. That attaches your signatures to each other so that when you're opening the book, you should have a nice transition between where one signature ended and the next one began. Instead of a great big gap in it, like I was showing you in the book where we sew it to the fabric cover. I just don't like those big gaps. I do this. Then I do this sit for 15 or 20 minutes like I stop and do something else and let it set up. I've lost the little lid to this one, so I made myself a little tape lid. But I let this set up a little bit and then I take that book tape because I want to keep going. Usually the day I'm making stuff, I want to make it that day. I need a little more room for the book tape, but I'll let this sit up for a little bit, and then we can run a layer of book tape across this and that's my cheat. Let's just see if I left enough room. I might not have, but this is my cheat for being able to keep going instead of letting it sit all night. I can do a book in one day. It really gives you extra strength on the spine, so don't even feel bad about the cheat. Let's see if I got that centered. There we go. Yes. Then the glue is still wet, and I'm okay with that. But then we just go ahead and secure that down. Now if you do it while it's wet like I'm doing it, and you're not going to see it, so don't even worry about what it looks like. It can have a wrinkle. When it's dry, I don't have to be so careful. If you do it when it's wet wet instead of giving it a few minutes, definitely wipe off extra bubbles. I don't want a big gigantic bubble of glue at the end. But I go ahead and then set that to the side while I'm working on the cover, and then I can attach the cover the same day. But I do normally let it sit for about 20 minutes before I put the tape on there and then it's easier and you don't get any glue spillage or anything. That's my little cheat. Now I just set this to the side and go ahead and make my next book. That's how I make this type of signature and we'll pull this back out when we're ready to make our cover. More thing I meant to mention on this one, when I've used the two different watercolor pads, whatever pads you're using. I kept this back page, this back cover of the pad to make the cover with. Sometimes I use bookboard, But on these, I decided that I was going to use the back of that pad and I just cut it in half so that it was the size of the pages folded in half. That's what I'm going to use for my cover. You could also, and you can see where I tore the label off the back of the pad, this label here, I just tore that off. And I just cut that in half and we're going to use that for the cover. You could also use book board, which is just basically just like this. I'll link those in your supply list. But I wanted to be able to give you a way to create your books without buying another extra supply and using the back of those pads. That's even thicker usually than that bookboard. I love it. Save the back of the pad, that's going to be your cover. 11. Assembling Your Book With Signatures: All right. I've already decided for this book, this was what I wanted to be the cover. This was a half a yard of fabric that I purchased at the fabric store because the you could collage together enough fabric for the cover if you wanted. But the fabric themselves are not big enough really for something like this. You'd have to collage it all together and make it big enough to overhang. I want about an inch overhang, you want to look at the front of the fabric and say, Okay, is that where I want that book to be? Is this what I want to be on the cover? This is a random cover and I'm putting stuff on top of it, so it's not as important. But if you've got some picture on there, a tall or something where you really want what's going on in the picture to be the center piece of your book, then you may have to waste a little bit of fabric to get that centered exactly where you want it. I'm just going to cut this out given myself a nice margin here. It doesn't have to be exact, it doesn't have to be perfect. You're not going to see that bit that we've folded when we're done. Then once we've got that cut, now I'm going to glue, I'm using a great big hu glue stick. I'm going to glue this to this cover. You're going to want to cut yourself an angle. To the book so that we can fold this in and then fold this over. You don't want to cut that angle right to the corner. You want to leave yourself about a millimeter of space there. Because if you cut it to the corner, that cardboard will be hanging out. You don't want to see that cardboard, you want that to loop the cardboard. So I wanted it not to be that big. Let's see. But you don't have to be perfect here. It's okay if you're a little off because that's going to be covered when we're done anyway. I used to cut a y, but then some of my y was crooked and I'm just like, let's just do it this way. Then I'm going to take the glue stick and I'm going to very liberally spread glue on here. If you've got a real thin fabric, I noticed on a handmade paper that I had any type of raised surface on the handmade paper showed up. You might have to make sure that you're not leaving any raised bits of glue or anything depending on how thin your fabric is, but this fabric is pretty thick. And you're not going to see anything like that. I'm just making sure I stick it down, and then I'm going to glue the edges and I'm going to work one side, the other side, third side, the fourth side, so that we pull in the direction together. If I worked one, two, three, four, then we might off pull the fabric weird and make it crooked, so work in the end side to side. Again, I'm just liberal amount of glue, and then just pull that in. Then the other end, I'm not even really worried about the edges completely sticking down so much as the center because we're going to have another something glued on that as we're finishing the book. U There's a lot of tutorials out there, and most of them are super specific and complicated, and they make it all seem much harder than it is. In the end, I just want a pretty art book to work in. I don't want to be so complicated and hard that I don't want to make a book. I want to be a little messy, it's not perfect. I'm okay with that. I don't get hung up on some of the extra things that people do. Which you might. Once you make the books, then you might go and make some more and think, Oh, I like this or I like that. This has a weird little overhang. I'm just going to clip it. There we go. There is one side, and Here's another. If you are more exact than I am, see this could be a hang off piece for our little paper clip, so keep even those little scraps there. If you are more exacting than I am, though, feel free to be as exacting as you need to be. I'm Man is pouring down rain outside. If you'll hear the thunders starting, you'll know. I'm more of a done is better than perfect person. My art journals probably follow that philosophy too, but my art journals are beautiful when we're done, so I don't even mind. Because these have been gorgeous. Okay. Let me tell you what. I really love the little fringe off the edge of this side here. Look at this fringe. This fringe is so pretty. I like the fringe. All right. Here we go. Got little pieces, save all the little pieces over there. And I'm just going to glue this one down just like we just did. All right, got my little edges done. I didn't even know it was supposed to rain today. I was thinking it was going to be sunny all week. I got the little weather app on my phone, and it always says no rain, and then it rains and I'm like, weather apps rib. All right. I off little cuts there because I kept moving my thing, but that's okay. That one's definitely going to show. Now I got you might glue it down and then cut your edges. That might make it even easier because I kept moving it as I was moving. Alright. Did I get that straight? Let's just see. Oh, yeah, like that. Good with that. We'll have other stuff going on, so it's not like I'm going to be focused on that. Pull that down. All right. Front and back. Excellent. Now, I was thinking. This is our book here. I was thinking. Snippet roll for the edge, but I want it to be the undecorated snippet, but we could be the decorated. Your choice there if you think, I love all the decorations. Then that's great. I was thinking undecorated though because I don't want most of my decoration to end up underneath the cover. We'll come from the other end. And cut myself big enough piece because after you decide where it's going to go, we could decorate this at the end. It doesn't have to be immediately. The reason I did it a little extra long was so that I could have a finished edge here on this piece. I want to fold this and that'll be a little bit. I want to do that down here also. I don't want it to be any taller than my covers. Before I glue this down, I'm going to check the height of the covers. I want it all to match and I want them to be the same height when I'm done. Just check in that length there on those. Good. Good job, and then I'll glue that down right there. Before I stick it for good, let me just double check. Excellent. Then I was thinking last night, there's some other stuff that we could do to decorate the edge also, we would need to decide what that is before we stick this down, we're going to glue this piece to the spine. I'm not going to sew anything else on here, but if you were going to sew some stuff, you would need to go ahead and do that first. Because once you glue this down, you can't sew it. I'm going to use the tacky glue. I want it to be more glue than I get out of that glue stick, and I want to definitely make sure that this sticks to the spine. I'm not worried about the edges really because the cover is going to cover the edge, but I need all the center part to definitely be attached. What I like about the tacky glue is the stuff works pretty fast. What I don't like about the tacky glue is stuff works really fast. I'm going to get this centered and make sure that I'm centered here also or at least close as I can get. And then I'm going to wrap it up the sides. There we go. I'm going to there we go. I'm going to wrap this around the sides just like that. And hold that for a minute. Because this tacky glue sets up pretty fast. I can double check this side, and now we have wrapped the spine. Now you see why I don't necessarily want to decorate the snippet roll first, because this is all that's going to be showing. Now if we're going to decorate it, we've got this much that we can decorate because this is going to be on this side, this is going to be on this side, and then you've got that you can decorate. I don't want you to waste your decorations or make it so thick, you can't make a spine out of it. That's my tip there on using a snippet as a spine, but I absolutely love it as a spine because look how interesting that is. It's beautiful. I'm just again, just making sure that we've really got that tack down. Now, before we glue the cover to this, because once I glue the cover to this, we're this parts gluing to this cover, Once I glue this on there, we're stuck with wherever we've decided. That's where we're going to be. If I'm figuring this here and this here, trying to make sure I'm right side up. I feel like it goes this way. Before we decide and I have I've used the back of the back of the sketch book that we pulled the paper out of for this cover. I doesn't overhang, like it does on other books that I've created, but I've decided that I absolutely love that it doesn't do that big overhang. It makes the book feel so firm and nice not to have a giant overhang, I almost feel like the overhang is like flimsy a little bit. I don't know if that's the right word for that. But I've decided that I don't love I like it to end at the papers and then I like the papers to be doing funky stuff coming out the sides. Before we continue, we got to decide, what are we going to put on here? Are we going to put a pocket? Do we want to have anything coming out the outside? Because I just happened to think that we could do something coming out the side and tie it off on the spine. If we were going to do that, I'd need to glue that down first? I'd need to glue that down here and this spine, cover would need to cover it, but we could have a piece coming out this side, and a piece coming out the back and we can tie a bow and that bow would then be on the spines. That's one option. We could also decide, is there anything else that we need to put on the spine? Is there something that had a gap and we could add a piece on there before we glue this down. Do we want to have a ribbon wrap around our piece like I did on the inspiration book that I made. In that case, we need to decide what that wrap around is and where we're going to attach it. Now, this one I've attached underneath the pocket that I made, so I didn't need to figure it underneath the cover. But we need to decide what is that going to be if we're going to use a wrap like that? I'm going to stare at this for a moment and think about it, and I'll be back. I've been thinking and I'm very inspired by the belt? Inspiration that I showed you on the other book that I'm going to make? I think I'm going to use this other belt attachable piece. A adjustable fashion slide adjuster. But almost like a belt thing. What if we took some of Our snippet. Let's just give ourselves enough room to think here. What if we cut this in half and I don't want to I don't want to sew these in and be all exact like I was sewing. But if you want to do that, you go for it, but I'm looking for things that are a little more scrappy. I've already sewed this edge here and I've already sewed this edge here because I want it scrappy, I'm going to leave it scrappy and let these edges hang out. But I do want to make sure it's the size of the belt loop. I guess that would have been smart huh. Slightly bigger than the loop. Now I know I need to cut this down just a hair so that these will at least fit in the loop and they're longer than I need. I know this. But I like having the extra, better to have it a little too long and be able to trim it than have it too short and go, darn, then this save that. For these to work, you got to have one that goes in like this to be the anchor. The anchor needs to anchor on this side. I feel like this is going to be my pocket here. And so I want that to be underneath that and be right there like that. Then this will need to be attached to our bottom spine, right there, wherever the belt loop is. Then this will then come up and we'll just be able to loop it right through here and then loop it right through there, and this is our closure for the book. We can then have this pretty belt closure and then that would be on the top there you'd pull it as tight as you needed it for however long that you left, but it's nice to have it a little bit long. If you stuff it full of collages and stuff and the book gets real fat, you got enough of a close here to ste. I'm feeling like this could be my closure we could even decorate the end of this snippet roll something pretty like a cluster. When we make clusters, that could be the end of a cluster, perhaps. It could be something like a fastener if we wanted to. We'd have to put the fastener on after the fact, though, I couldn't live on there. Think about that also. Whatever lives on here has to fit through the loop. I might just do it like that. We could end it with a piece of a piece of piece of ribbon, it could end, have a piece on the end here. It could do that if you wanted it to be pretty. I don't know. Think I'm going to leave it like that though, I like that. I think I'm going to make this well sew these into a pocket for the cover. And then we can still decorate the end if we want a glue stuff to the end. You can still put some ribbon coming out both sides and tie it if you want some ribbon ties coming down the end. That's another thing to think about. But I think for mine, I'm going to do a pocket and a belt closure with our loop stuff here. I'm going to go and set the sewing machine up for a moment and just run two stitches across here. I'm going to cut it to the length I want. Because this is longer. This is from the kit, one of those pre made color kits, and I just love the details in here. I'm going to decide on where I want it and then cut it. I'm going to sew this here here and here, and then we can glue this down, and then we can glue it all together. Let me do that real quick and I'll be right back. All I have sewed these together. You could glue these together if you want to make a pocket. I did happen to notice as I was sewing this and planning on the size because I trimmed the extra bits off and I'm just going to keep that for little clusters that the way I planned on putting this on here basically covered most of the design. Another option that you could do if you had a design that you loved and you wanted that to still be showing would be maybe a pocket on lower down or a ribbon instead of a pocket, but I wanted it to be a pocket. Personally. I'm going to stick with my pocket plan. Then what can you do with the pockets? Then you can take a piece of art or something, and this can be little tuck spots and you can tuck things in. Maybe not something that big, but you could take pretty little things and it could be a spot to tuck things in. Or you could use pockets in the book. That's always fun. It is pretty there, but if I put it there, then that's not going to cover my belt loop like I want. I'm going to go ahead and stick it where I meant to stick it. And just ride that idea because I do like it there. I'm going to glue this down with the fabric glue and now I'm afraid to move it because that's exactly where I want it. I'm just going to go a nice bead all the way around and in the middle of the pocket because I do want this to be on there forever. I like that back fabric that I'm doing the glue like this. I like it to be pretty thick. I don't want it to soak all the way through the fab and glue all the layers down. I am keeping that in mind. As I'm gluing things, I don't want to glue everything. You know what I didn't do. Hang on before that's glued down for good. I need to get my belt loop underneath there. Hello. This is the belt loop. And I want it to be about right there and it'll be up under there. I'm going to glue this part together. Then I want this part also glued and I'm going to pick this back up and Let's see if we're at about the center. Hang on. Let's go back further. Is that about the center? Trying to look up to see what's going to be the center now close enough. If you were going to glue this fabric here to The cover, you would have needed to do that before you glued to the cardboard to the bookboard. You got to think logically, what do you want to have on here, which is why I was planning those other ones out that I was showing you. You got to think logically, what do I want to include, what layer do I have to assemble those? There's the top. I know that's what I want to be on the top, so I'm good with that. Now, that stuff is so good. Now I want to glue this paper to this. The paper itself is a little bit less than say what's right up underneath it. You might take a piece of deli paper. Let me grab some deli paper. You might protect the underneath layers just until you get it glued in and going with some deli paper just in case you have any glue spillage or whatever, protect it. Then I'm going to use the tacky glue. I'm going to get a lot of it on here and then I'm going to take the card like just a little shopping card or something piece of cardboard. I'm going to spread this flatter because I don't want great big looks of glue. I'm just going to spread this out. You see why you might want maybe a little piece of deli paper there protecting underneath layers just in case you swipe some you didn't intend. Then if I've got any that's left hanging out on the end, I can squeeze a little glue down there. Let me set this down over here where it's not going to glue anything. I don't want to glue. W. I need to decide exactly where I want that to sit. I'm looking to see if I've covered to the edge. What I might even do take a little bit of tacky glue here at the edge, and then have some baby wipes handy. I've got some baby wipes over here at my desk. Just in case you've got any squeeze out, you can baby wipe those off as I touch the glue. Which is a messy job. Let's see what we're actually attached to here. Hang on. Let me get this positioned where I want it. You've got a minute or so to be able to move stuff around, but then after that, you're you're locking yourself in with this tacky glue. Let me grab a baby wipe just to make sure. I don't end up with some glue where I didn't intend it. And it dries clear, so you're never going to see it after that. You just want to make sure you've got it all on the right spot, that you're covering both sides of the spine, that you're actually covered the paper where you intended to cover the paper. At this point, I'm being real careful to open the book because I don't want to dislodge anything that I've done, like the spine that I made. And because my snippet roll is so thick, there will be there will be, like, a Like a raised bubble right here on this paper, but that's because the snippet rolls there and it's super thick. Get this in here and I'm going to press again. But now that we've got it all in there, press everything down. We're committed now. I actually think I glued this down, but I don't think it stayed. I grabbed it, which dislodged it. I just want to be able to have that up, but I want that to stay. You got to be careful as you're maneuvering around all the bits and pieces that you don't dislodge something that you already did. Then we can glue the backside on. Then you have to actually let this dry overnight. I don't want to forget to put this on. I had some glue on that side. Hang on. I don't want to forget to put this on. Not grab it by the belt. How about that? Don't grab it by that. Be careful. I want to judge where I put this though. That will eventually dry and I'll quit grabbing it. It'll dry tonight. You're going to let this sit overnight after you glue all this because all this moving stuff around is not good. I got to figure out too exactly where the belt loop is on this side, and then I can glue this down before I glue the whole thing down. I do want to glue it where this side, the correct side is out. If I go ahead and see exactly, I can glue this. Right in here. That was the tacky globe, that's okay. That way, I know it's in the right spot hopefully to grab. They can have a little bit of leeway, but it needs to be as close as possible to the same spot. Then we'll go ahead and I glued the paper the first time, but it might be just as easy to glue the cover. And maybe just edge the paper here. Checking that I got it straight and there's nothing weird overhanging anywhere and that it matches the front and the back. And that comes about the right spot before I push it down for good. And then what we're going to do Once we're making sure that everything's where we want it and that our paper there is not sticking. I don't want the paper permanently stuck in here. Then we're going to stack this under some books and let that dry overnight before you look inside and experiment and start playing around with some other stuff. Now you got to let this one dry overnight before you can play. But now we've got our closure right here. Perfect. We want all these bits and pieces to dry and become firm, and then we will be able to use our beautiful book. So I hope you enjoyed trying out some of these techniques using your snippet role as say a spine and perhaps a closure, picking a pretty fabric that's different than the fabric on the back, experimenting with different pockets and such that you might consider, even though I covered most of the design, I like how it outlays and it's pretty and matches. I hope you enjoy making one of these. I'm going to go ahead and assemble my other two that I've cred and the way that we talked about, and then we are going to make some. I still have some more ideas to show you and I will see you back in class. 12. Making Clusters: Let's talk about making some pretty clusters. I've got lots of little clusters. There's a couple of different ways that you can go about making these and you want to just save all your little scraps and bits that you've got. I've got a few more back here. Here we go. You want to save all these scraps and bits that you trim off your books, and then you can collect a few more scraps and bits that you come across or have little pieces left over, save all of that because we can use those in a cluster. A cluster is basically a little tiny gathering of what you've got to, and you can do these in several different ways. You could take three different pieces like a piece of muslin, maybe a piece of something that was pretty, a little piece of lace, and then maybe a few buttons and a few seed beats. That's one super easy way to make a cluster. Then these are sewn on there. You can take a needle and thread and you can sew all of that on there. A second way that you could do this is put a dot of glue right here in the middle and glue the first piece of fabric to the second piece of fabric, glue the top piece onto that, glue your buttons on and you can do the whole piece glued together. If you're doing fabric, you might consider the lens fabric fusion, or the tachy glue. You could try the glue stick just depends on how much glue stick really adheres to the fabric. I'd probably personally go for the tachy glue because it's easy, that's the second way you could do it. A third way that you could make these is with a fastener. These little bulb pins are extremely easy to use, and you can just pin each piece of fabric that you want to be on the cluster. You could even maybe put a tag, maybe even a charm. Then that's a beautiful cluster and it required no sewing at all. You just pinned all the bits in there that you wanted to have in your piece. I love that in particular. Another way that goes along with this, is using a little mini bull clip and clipping all the pieces that you want to include. Maybe piece of fabric, maybe some lace laid in here and then clip that with these little mini bull clips. I've got these bull clips from Tim Holtz line, ideology, I think, they're little fasteners that they carry. Then if you do something long like this because this is much bigger than the little ones that I was just showing you. Then you might consider say a second fastener to keep it all together. That's a little bulb piece and a button. Again, no so in this. Another example, a pretty little stamp on a piece of muslin. These are t stains, so they look antique. Then you can see there's a piece of fabric that's decorative and then a piece of muslin with a little stamp on it. That's a fun little secret hiding in there, little piece of cheese cloth, little piece of fabric with some eyelet, lace pattern on it, piece of lace on the top. Two pieces of lace on the top, so you can just keep layering these until you're like, I love that little bundle of pretty stuff, and then maybe a little piece of silk sorry ribbon here in the fastener and then a little bulb pin with a button holding it further down. Again, a really easy no so way and you can make the no so in the smaller pieces. That's a nice way. Another way to do it and this would be paper here. Let me show you that little. I was looking around for my fastener box. These are what those little bull clips look like. They're just little miniature bull clips. They come in different colors. I think there's probably a silver out there. This is brass and black. Then these safety pins, these bulls bulb safety pins come in different colors. I found if you get theology ones that are in the sewing department, they come in like black and silver. You get a whole lot more for cheaper than if you get the bronze colored Tim Holtz ones from wherever his products are sold. There's half or less in the box of these for double the price that I got for just the white or black or the silver. Keep that in mind, you could get a much better deal, getting these from theology and the S department. Soolgy is the brand, I believe. Look around Tim Holtz stuff, even though I love it, it's not always the best priced. Another pretty one with the pin holding it together. I have several of those, different colors, you can make them go into different color ways, and again, a pin one, and it's got a little bit of thread hanging down for packaging, so you could wrap it around something. I could take that off. Another way to do it is to sew paper bits together. If you have a lot of scrapbook papers or you want to use these as tidbits in your book that you're making as pages inside. You could even make some of these be some tabs on the pages. You could fold them in half and that could be a tab on the page hanging out because it's fun on the journals, especially the art journals. If you get into junk journaling, then you'll really go that route. But it's really a lot of fun to have different elements sticking outside the book as well as inside the book. These can include layers of paper, maybe a layer of fabric, and then run that through your machine with a zig zag stitch. You could just make 1 million of these as you're making them and different sizes, different elements included old book pages, piece of lace, pretty paper. You could just sit down one day and make a bunch of these. You could have some visual elements or stickers or tags or something that you really love on a piece, and you could make tons of these. Another way to make these sounds pretty without sewing is staples. That's another way. You could have paper, maybe something that you have glued on there, maybe a bit that's transparent, and these are stapled with a couple of staples. Another no so method to make some of these lovely pieces, and this one's just got a couple staples in there holding it together. Some elements glued together with one staple holding the papers on the back paper. That's fun with a camera on there. That one really speaks to me. Again, everything just stapled and a sticker. You can see how you could definitely make the clusters work for you, no matter what it is that you're trying to make, whether it be with a little bit of sewing, without a little bit of sewing with glue, without glue. We could definitely have tons of pretty ideas. I love this one a couple book pages, something pretty under there, like a little strip of something, a little bit of lace and a flower. Again, just stapled on the back. That one really speaks to the style that I'm going towards in a lot of my art pieces lately. Definitely experiment and they've got a little technique there for all of these. You can do a lot with the clusters. These can decorate tags. They can decorate journal covers. Look how pretty that is. This is just a tag with a little bit of adhered to it, pretty little lace streamers at the top, button sewn on. This is a piece that you could glue right in the middle of that and look how beautiful that tag could be, and that could be the front of journal. It could be tuck in that you tuck in a journal. It could be where we use the pocket that we've made on front. We could tuck this in the pocket. This could be a beautiful tuck in that you add to a card that you descend to somebody as something beautiful and handmade that you created for them. I like the idea of the little tags with some lace on it, and then maybe a cluster on the top. Really beautiful idea for something we can create. I'm going to gather up a few things here and then we're going to make some clusters of our own. All right. Let's make up some little clusters. I've just pulled out lots of little bits and pieces that I've started collecting and little tiny bits that I've cut off from stuff and little pieces that came on. Some of my slow stitching, junk journal fabric kits that I ordered that I told you guys about. I've got some pieces like these. Little pieces of lace with a pin in it. Got that yummy muslin ribbon, and I've got my jar of scraps that I have been saving from everything that we've been cutting. I just thought that we could more pretty little ribbon. Got some pretty little bits that I got from that 1924 shop that I linked for all on Etsy, and these are perfect for the top layer of these little clusters like up underneath, maybe some buttons. I love these little tiny lace bits. I've pulled that out and I've got this sitting over here. I've got lots of choices, not a little last bit. And every time I turn around, I've got these little bits on the floor somewhere. I've just scattered them everywhere. But we can start and decide what little cluster did we want? You might pick a fabric that you're like, Whoa, that's gorgeous, like this one right here, I'm going to go ahead and just cut this in half. Maybe we can use this for two different clusters. Love and that. I'm also thinking like some type of fabric on the back side. I really love this piece of looks like died blue fabric. I'm just going to take this pin out of here and we're going to claim this fabric. It looks like it was probably e crew colored and somebody used it for. And died. I'm trying to think and look at the same time. That's really pretty. I like all these extra little pieces. This piece is really pretty. I love this. Basically, what we're doing is just layering and stacking. I actually love this piece that came off of our books too like this one. This would be good. If we cut a little piece of that, that could be maybe a piece in between here. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Then we might pick a few buttons and just think. If we look at our inspiration pieces, we've got piece of fabric on the back, pretty piece of fabric, piece of lace and buttons on it. We're there with maybe even a piece or two of some ribbon on the top, like that. Like that. Then maybe some buttons out of grandma's button box. I can't even tell you how exciting it is to be able to dig into the button box and have a new purpose in life for the different buttons in the box. Then if you've got any seed beads, which I do have some seed beads, you can get those out and glue those around your pieces, and now I'm just kind of looking through the box and picking a color. Feeling like, that's pretty. I want to save some of these out of here because I like that pink. Love that purple. I like on this one, this blue button. That'd be nice if there was another one. I feel like we're channeling that pretty blue that's on the bottom of there. We see a couple of colors there would be pretty. Some little mother of pearl beads, buttons. Look at that. That's pretty. These actually feel like mother of pearl. I feel like these are actually real mother of pearl. You can tell here old, they're discoloring. That can be pretty like that. Look at that right there. I think we've got a winter right there. I'm feeling like there's one cluster. Let's just go ahead and glue these and we'll see how that works out. I got what I wanted. For this one, I'm going to glue it and it would be really nice if I had a piece of let me go grab a piece of deli paper. I've got some deli paper. Got a little bit of glue. I'm just going to put a little tab of glue. I don't want to glue the whole thing. I just want to glue in the center bits. Doesn't have to be perfect, but it's going to dry clear and I just want a tiny bit of glue enough to hold in what we're doing here. If you've got a glue dab that you think is going to show, then that's where you can put a button. Then you cannot immediately move these around and be touching on them, you got to let them dry a bit. Once you make one with glue, which in a case like this, it might even be easier if you were working with this one. If you were working with, I thought maybe we would do one glue one look at that. So pretty. Then maybe one sown with a needle and thread, and then maybe one that we just attach with a fastener. So you can get a feel for it, and you can see how if I had some little seed beads, let me go find the seed beads. I'll be right back. I found some tiny containers of beads because I also at one point was into jewelry making, metal smiting, beating, you name it. I have probably tried it. I have all the very, very old packages of glass seed beads, antique glass seed beads and You name it. I've got a plethora of hobbies that I've done over the years. I'm thinking this blue and the green might be a pretty tiny. Let's hope I don't spill these everywhere. But basically, Oh my gosh. Oh, did it without spilling it everywhere. Couple popped out. I'm thinking if you hit the Michaels or something like that, little craft stores, you can get little seed beads. I thought I had a little container of seed beads and I probably do. They're probably hiding from me. But what I'm going to do is basically put maybe a dab of glue here and maybe here, and then we are going to cover that glue hopefully with beads. Then it dries clear. I'm not worried about any glue being leftover. A Maybe a few of these in there will be pretty. Maybe a few up here. And then whatever is not actually stuck down, I can brush those off after it dries. We'll give it a chance to do its thing. There we go. We have our very first, lovetle glue cluster. That's one way that we can do the clusters. You saw how super easy and that ends out. Now think. Let's set these to the side. If I do beads again, I'll probably glue them, but we'll decide. Let's set the beads to the side before I spill them everywhere. Now I'm thinking let's do one that we sew. We could actually because I'm feeling like this could be the front of a journal, possibly, maybe not the journal that I'm doing today, but I'm Let's do a different one. I was thinking front of the journal definitely, but Maybe you know what? Let's use the bad pin with this button already on it because that's convenient, little pin with the button. Let's make one of these that we pin. I'm going to go ahead and use a piece of this lace. I like that I liked this flower pattern that we used in that book. This might be one that I even take back and put on the book or use with the book. Here's some Muslin ribbon. We could use some of that. And tearing, it's probably even better than cutting it, but I'm going to cut it for now to get a frayed edge, which is why I was thinking that. But we could fray the edge of these, just pull some of that fabric out and make it scruffy. Here we go. Now we've got it a little scruffier. This could be maybe underneath here and give it some bulk and some layer possibly. Feeling like there's too much of this one. We'll save this. Give it give it a little direction there, maybe turn that the other way instead of up and down. Then, is there anything else that I want to add to this? Maybe a little something on top, maybe one of those little lace pieces. Let's do that thing right there, like a little flower. Do that. Then let's take our pin. We're going to go all the way to the back and back up to the of our piece and then pin that and there we go. Now we have a lovely second little cluster that just took a minute to put together and pin together and there was no sewing involved. Now I can see a couple of these are not attached. We'll save those or we'll try to save them. I might end up with beads everywhere when I'm done. There we go. Now we have one that we've glued, one that we have pinned, and I want to do one that we sew, so we're just looking at the different options here. I've got a needle and thread, just picked out a creamy thread, and I'll go ahead and thread my needle so that we are prepared. I think I picked the needle with the smallest head on the planet. When I was younger, I could see the needle hole. Now that I'm older, I can't see the needle hole. I got a needle threader. Here we go. Let's just get the needle threader. Maybe I'll just get the bigger needle though because I've got a bigger needle here. And it's got a peach thread on it. Let's go ahead and use that one. This one's better. It's got a pretty thread color already stuck on it. See this is why If you've got a nice long piece of thread leftover, don't take it off your needle because then when you get around to something like this, you won't have to thread your needle, and you can just get going. That's a gigantic knot on that. I think I'll make this a smaller knot. And I'm just going to wrap it around my finger like that, and now we are ready to make one with a little tiny bit of sewing. Let's see what else that we've got here. I really love some of the scrappy fabrics. Some of these I got online and they're little pre torn ribbon fabrics, and I want to say these maybe the Tim Holtz fabrics are torn into torn ribbons, but I love this one here, I love love it. Look how pretty that is. I'm going to save that for something. But look at that. This little snippet would be beautiful with that fabric somehow. I just love some of these. I'm going to actually use some more of this little snippets here. I love this one. Look at this little flower bit. These are nice because we can just cut a little tiny piece off of these. Oh, I love it. Love it. Here's a little piece of muslin with a stamp on it. That is super fun. I'm going to save that I think. Let's see what else we got. I want some lace. I've got a little snippet here of lace. Maybe that on top, we'll trim it down, save our bits, save all your little bits. That's what this little jar is handy for. A little jar of scraps. This is pretty. This was a scrap of something. I think it was ribbon, but I stuffed it in my jar. That could be a little scrap of something under there. I like that. What else do we got in here? We've got some snippet rolls. We've got a we've got these corners that I've cut off from the books, I love those. I've got the little scraps of the snippets. Let's see. Just seeing if there's anything in here that I want to use. I love this piece of green. I love the piece of green. Let's use that. I like how teal it is. Let's cut that and This can be underneath. Maybe it's sticking out a little bit. I love that. Look at that. Good one. Then let's see what else we got. Feeling like what about one of these little pieces that I was talking about? Those are fun. That might be too much. Maybe a button. Let's check out the buttons. We could do a big button. Look at that one. We could totally do a big button. Of course, then I might not want that pink thread, but who cares? Look at that button. Mr. Let's see. We got a yellow button. That's a fun choice there. We could do some little buttons. These mother pearl buttons might be fun because they were really pretty. Those are fun. Maybe a tiny bit of a pink one to pull in the pink thread I'm about to use. Let's see. Do we like that? We like that. Then we could even put seed beads on this one. For this, I would start at the very back and I'm just going to get the thread to come up through it and I'm going to sew the button on, and that's going to hopefully go through all the layers of fabric that I have here and pin us down. I don't have to be a lot, just enough to tack it. You're not trying to go full on button so some button that's never going to come off. You just tack it down. Then I'm going to that. Then I'm not even going to take that I'm not even going to cut the thread yet. I'm just going to come on up to the next one. I did a totally wonky didn't even do an x in that button. I just took it wherever I could get it to come back through. If you don't want it to show up, then maybe use just a neutral colored thread. I don't mind the little bright pop of color there. I might coordinate that color with a pink seed bead maybe, maybe this pretty pink button here. Let's see, I think that's the top. With the seed beads though, I probably would glue those on here, but you could sew them. You could sew them. They've got holes in them to be sewed. Really, I know how to sew, but the less swing I have to do the better. That's pretty. Because if the seed beads, I want to more random. Let's just tie this off and say, we got it. I'm just going to put a nod in here by looping all these and just pulling that tight. You can double nod it if you need to. Then I think I'm going to go for maybe some pink little seed beads because I know I brought some over here. Oh, let's do it. I'm going to glue these down. There we go. Very careful. Did I get that one in under? Yeah. Just make sure I got all of those under a piece of thread somewhere. Maybe a little dot of glue there and a dot of glue there, and we'll stuff some seed beads on that. Let them dr and then I'll tap off whatever didn't get connected here in a bit. There we go. We'll let those set up and then whatever doesn't get connected, I'll tap back off. But let's see. A bunch didn't get connected. There we go. Look how pretty that is. There we go. We've got three easy ways to create a snippet. I want you to get together. All your little lace bits, if you've got any fun, any old buttons, any scraps of fabric on any of the projects that you've been creating, and then you can do some sewing. You can attach it all without sewing, you can attach it all with glue. Three easy different ways to make your snippets and to use up all the little bits that you might normally just throw away. This is something that I probably would have just chunked. But you can see for a snippet, how this would be perfect. I want you to gather what you've already been collecting to create some of these with. Then I want to use some snippets on a journal cover, which is where I was going with these, but you can also use these as decorations for tags and stuff like we were talking about. Look how pretty that would have been. On top of a pretty tag on top of some lace that you put on that. It'd be the most beautiful bookmark. It'd be a great gift. It's a good tuck in for an art journal, it's a good bookmark in an art journal. It's pretty for say, the cover of a journal. Lots of fun things that you can do with these pretty little clusters, and they're super easy to make. I hope this inspires you to make something pretty with all your little scraps and leftover bits. I hope I showed you some way between the three methods that you're like, Ha ha, I could do that. I'll see you in the next video. 13. Glue Binding Book: I'm going to show you the perfect binding, the glue binding real quick. This is the other binding that I truly love to use. It makes beautiful books like this, which we can then edge really easy and make a finished professional looking book. Then we open them up and they lay flat and we can work on it like we do a flat piece of paper, I can take these off and do individual pieces or I can work a long spread. I love love having books like this to work in. And the glue binding is just like you're reading a book and it's glued together, that's what this binding does. I'm going to show you real quick, and I'm going to make I've made some little ones that are ready for covers, but this is a good way for little mini works in a minute, 100 day project, little pieces of art. What I like about the glue binding is, you can see I can open it flat and it's still glued together. These glues are flexible. We add about four or five layers of glue and then we're ready to make our lovely cover for it and look how beautiful this little four by four inch book is going to be. These were my little pads of paper that I get in my monthly sketch box. I loved this one so much. It's a hot press watercolor paper that I like to do little miniature paintings on this paper. I thought, Hey, I need to make these little miniature paintings in their own little book and then I can have a little book when I'm done because I do a little art in the minute videos with that and then I have all these little random tiny pieces of paper hanging around. Now we can have them in a little book. I'm pretty excited about that, but I'm going to show you how to make that real quick and I'm going to do it with a hot press paper. I'm sorry, a rough paper. I'm using the arches rough. Which is another fun paper to work on. That book that I just showed you was like a landscape direction, like we opened it in this direction. They were wide. I'm going to make a book that's more this direction, where I can open it up like a book. One pot of paper is plenty. I go ahead and separate all the pages from the glue that's on these. Rough press paper it's interesting paper to work on if you've never tried. It's got a weird texture and it works differently than a regular paper. But I go ahead and just separate all these out. Then when I've got them all separated out, I tear the front off the back and that's what I use. I told you about bookboard in the last video. This is what bookboard looks like. It's basically nice thick chipboard. But these seem to be a tiny bit thicker even than the bookboard. But you can buy a bookboard, if you'd rather. But I just like using these because why waste it? We're going to cut these in half. They are. Let me just measure this to make sure they're exactly what it says because some of these pads of papers are quarter inch different? See this is 12 and a line. I need to cut these six and part of a line. Why do they do that? You can see it's 12 and a line there. Look at that. I'm thinking six in the middle of that line and we'll just hope I get it close. It doesn't have to be perfect. This goes one, two, three, four, five, six. What is that line? Is that line? Six and a lines. That line is that bigger one. Now I'm looking at the little half a line there. All right. 6.5 a line right there. I'm just going to cut it on my paper cutter, and we'll hope that those are perfect. Now I'm going to cut all 12 of these pages because that was 12 sheets, which will give me a 24 sketch book. Because these are watercolor papers, I can use what media on them, which I love. Once you've got that cut, you might just take your paper here and mark the lines rather than try to measure it again. Then you'll know that that's going to be correct. Let me make sure that was straight. Then what I do to cut the cover is I just have a cutting mat and a great big ruler. I put the cutting mat, I've got a great ruler, and I use a utility knife, so be careful because my fiscal cutter that I was just using is not got a blade as thick as what this is. Then I very carefully just it times I get it. And you can see when it finally separates that you've cut through it, I don't try to cut it with scissors and I don't try to cut through it all in one go. I just very carefully do several swipes and it just makes its way through the layers. Then hopefully, we've got a book cover the right size. There we go. If it's not perfect, even though I just measured that, it's not perfect perfect. In that weird how that turned out it's not perfect perfect and it bugs you. You can use bookboard. For your other piece, which that does bug me that it just didn't do even. Let's see if I've got, look at that. P. Because this one is the right size. I want it's slightly bigger, I don't want it. I don't know why that didn't just do that. You saw me measure it. How funny is that. Let me just take one piece of bookboard, so you can see the difference in the bookboard. I might just go ahead with my pencil. H. And cut myself one out of the bookboard. Why did that not turn out? Look at that. But I've also made them where one was slightly smaller because I did the same thing on this book and the back is slightly smaller. If you do that and you don't want to cut the bookboard piece so that they're both the same size. You can then align this back piece with paper or fabric or when we're cutting our snippet rolls, we could cover this with snippet roll. And we could edge it so that it covers the edges, which is why I'm making some of these, so I can do snippet rolls. We could either do a snippet roll, ribbon cover, where we have say three sections like this, which was one of my ideas. In doing that, we're actually going to be overlapping slightly. But I don't want it to overlap too much, but we could do even like this and have that overlap. But that could be how you fix that millimeter, that it's short because it really is just a millimeter. But it's enough to drive me a little batty that apparently, I do that every single time. No matter how I'm doing it. What the heck? I don't matter how many times you do this, you're still going to make funny little things like that. But instead of covering them up, which I could do, I could just not show that to you. I would rather show you that we all do it, and what is the solution to fix that? So that when you do it, you don't get stuck and frustrated. And give up and be upset that your piece didn't turn out perfect. Let's see if that one's a good size. What the heck. We got the same size now? Yes, we do. Thank goodness. What the heck. Now I've got my front and back cover, which we do that later. It's not like I needed that right now anyway. But I save all these book board pieces because maybe I could use it on a little miniature one. Who knows? Okay. Now what we're going to do. Usually, I do this between lots of books. I'm going to grab some books and I'll be right back. I grab a couple of books. Usually what I do is I just tap this real hard because whatever it is, you want even if some of the pages stick out further than others, which apparently, even though I measured perfectly and cut that line, I have a long page in a short page, but it's cool for an art book. I'm okay with that. That's why we're off on that cover, I guess. Even though I measured exact, how crazy is that? But you want one edge to be completely flat. So Work it there and get that super flat, and we're going to glue that edge. I was going to consider what if we did the clamp method, because I want to do clamp method, but I want to just mention this if you don't have clamps. Usually what I do is I will make sure it's all taped down, stacking in between two books and now we're ready to glue this edge. That's the easy way to do that. I want to test out the clamp method to see if it works because I didn't try it before. We'll just see and that way I can hold it where you can see it too, but I'm feeling like We could do this, and it would work just as good. I've got the two paint sticks, just making sure Everything is clamped down. The only goal here is just for it to stay secure for us. Then Mike could just set this right here so we can see what I'm doing. How about that? Now we're going to take some glue. I've got the neutral pH adhesive glue here, which is full, so it's easier to get to, but I could also use the tai free acid free, tacky glue on this and you want to brush that you don't mind using for glue. Let this be the glue brush after this. Basically, all we're going to do is dip our brush into our glue. And we're going to glue this edge with the glue. And I'm going to glue one layer. Of glue and then let that dry and then another layer and let that dry and then another layer and let that dry until I have about four and possibly five layers of glue on there. It's going to give it enough glue to hold all the pages and hopefully be able to survive any abuse that you're going to be using, giving it like painting and open it and closing it and using it, it's going to be able to survive that abuse. I just keep a little wet wipe or a paper towel handy. And I just clean any glue bubbles off the sides because you're not going to see it when we're done, I like to attach the first page to the cover. It's just my own personal preference. I feel like it makes the book stronger and it's how I've decided, I like to do that. Once you've got that going. First layer, you're going to have to let that set up for maybe 15 minutes. It's really good if you can do two or three of these at the same time because I paint one, and then I let it sit there and I go paint the next one, and then I come back to this one because if you give it just a few minutes to set up, you can come right back over that for the next layer of glue. It's already tacked up a little bit and it's ready for you to paint a second coat on there after just a few minutes. I like to do four to five coats. And then you let that set up and dry overnight. There's our second coat, and we're going to do four coats of that. Then when we're all done, we will end up with a book, and this is one that I've already prepped, but we will end up with a book that looks like this. This is one that I did on the long end, but you'll have a nice layer of dried glue here at the end, and then you'll be able to open those and lay flat and all your pages are now attached to each other. That is the goal. Four layers of that and we'll have to let that dry overnight. And we will be set with the glue binding, and we'll be ready to add a cover to our piece. Go ahead and decide what kind of book you're making, whether it be the sod signatures or the glue binding, and I will see you back in class. Once this is dry, we'll be able to use it further in class. 14. Making Book With Clusters on Spine: I have been brainstorming. Here is our flat journal, the glue binding journal that we created. What I love about this type of journal is that these pages lay flat and it's still stiff because I've let it dry for two days. I'm breaking spine when I'm doing this to make it bendable. That's what I like about these. It's flexible, it holds the paper. They lay flat, now I can paint on both pages and everything stays contained in a book. This is the one where I cut the two different bookboards to make sure they were the right size. Doesn't matter how many times I measure it. I don't know I end up with something funky. I'm thinking that I want a brown velvet ribbon as the spine. Then I've got some more of this Tim Holtz fabrics. I had bought just several little quarters. These might be a half yard pieces, but I just thought they were cool. I'm feeling like this funky vintage look. It's like old newspapers and stuff is what that looks like. If we just wrap this around it, we can get an idea. Thinking that for the front, and I'm even thinking on the front. Some of our clusters that we created as the decoration possibly. Then this other one that looks like really dark handwriting almost to be the back fabric on the back cover. Then we could tie it off with this muzzlin piece of fabric as tying the journal closed as maybe a finish. That's where I'm thinking. I'm going to put all these to the side, and I'm going to maybe speed this up because we're doing the exact same thing that we did in the other book. I'm just going to glue this down, and then I'm going to glue each of these fabrics to this board and get that set. That is what I'm doing right now. I'm going to go ahead and make this the right size. I'm just using to do this my acid free tacky glue because it's my favorite. It's the one I like to use. It's tacky, It sets up really easy and fast. Just make sure I've got the right length there. Then I'm not worried about any glue getting on the paper because this sheet is my end cover. It's going to stick to my book page, so I'm not too worried about that. I don't want it to be a big lump though. I'm going to take a wet cloth and if I've got a big lump there, smooth it out. The reason why I use the tacky glue on that piece, but I'm going to use glue stick on the boards is because the velvet ribbon is thicker than the the fabric here that I'm using. If it's a real thick fabric, use a thick glue. It's a real thin fabric, you can get away with a glue stick. I would press this down under a stack of books overnight and you could do that first. Then I would attach some of these pretty trinkets that we made. Feeling like right there. Then I want this to be for tying it. I'm thinking that it can just be tied. That could be one way. Another option would be to, like, what is that? Have this attach and maybe with a belt loop like our little belt loop thing. We could attach one of these over here and not have that, it could be a bet it could be the belt holder, that could be one option, which I'm like in that option also. Third option could be I could do a velvet around it. You don't have to have any of that at all if you just want to leave it like it is, but I want to use my pretty pieces that we created. Here's the ones that sewed in class. Let's see. Not quite the right colors. This one is py though. That might be a choice. And that could be holder of the belt. I can loop that under for a belt loop and then this can thread through the belt loop to hold it shut because I like the belt loop closure. That's fun. Also our tag option. If we stick this on a tag, this could be a tag option. We can leave it urban and grungy if we want and just have the muslin tie. That might be a good way to go also. But I really like our pieces here. This could be the end of our thing, that would be could be on the cover. That would be fine too, could be just glued here on the cover, and it could loop around. That would be. Now as we're sitting here thinking of this, I'm in this option. Look at that because that could be three of those. And just glue them to come down over it, and then we've got this pretty yummy beaded option with the buttons and the beads, and it's very interesting on our book, and then we could do the tie. Then we could do this tie coming underneath that one. Holding it down. Then we could have the belt loop over here. Definitely feeling that. Let me find my belt loop and I'll be right back. I'm going to change directions on directions on a tiny bit I can't find the belt loop that I know I have. I've hidden it from myself. I don't know where I put it. I showed it to be a class, one of the packages, and I don't know. I hid the package from myself, and I was looking through my grandmother's button box, and I found a very old belt loop thing and I thought, that's a maybe, that's a maybe, but it's not wide enough. And it's not very statement doesn't make a big statement. Then I found this gigantic button, which is not antique. I actually found that at Hobby lobby in their button stuff. I thought, at that. Oh, my gosh, it's amazing, but it doesn't really go in with my wanting to use these lovely little clusters. It's almost like I'd have to leave those off, but my point of making these was so I could use them. Then I found this other one, which was also a hobby lobby button. I thought, look at that. That would be pretty cool. I still put that these at the end. I want to point out these things that I found in the button box. These are some vintage, leather, button the whole thing. I'm not going to use them in this, but I wanted to bring it out to show it to you and give you an idea. If you come across any fun enclosures. You can have a button there that fit this obviously. You could glue this down to say, a ribbon piece, that could be your closure. If you found if you came across anything like that or you had something that was old that you could cut that off of? How amazing is that? Now I'm going to use that idea and do a button that's smaller on something and that could be the closure on a journal. I just wanted to throw that idea out there. I'm thinking that I could have the button there and that this can then wrap around it for a wrap closure. Now, how are we going to get this button on here? I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put I'm going to make an take my l, and I'm going to punch a hole through here, and I'm going to use some embroidery thought floss and attach this button through our already glued page. There is a w, there is a way. I'm going to be real careful hopefully. I've got this just a piece of foam that came in some packaging that I kept because I thought, I could punch stuff through a piece of paper in that, and it'd make good punch art. That's just my cutting mat. I just got to decide in the center. Another idea I wanted to show you too. They make this elastic stuff. I don't know about you, but I like elastic closures on my book sometimes. I was like, Oh, that would be so cool. If we cut that to the length to go around the book, and then where we had to, so it shut, we could glue one of these on there. How cool would that be as an elastic closure for our book. Just another idea that I was thinking when I bought this fun elastic. Elastic, I don't know. I didn't see a lot of choices. I might have to order some other things online. Usually get white, black, And u There was a fun rose gold one and there was a gold. I don't know the gold and the silver overpowering for like this book or maybe the silver would be all right or maybe the rose gold, but maybe a thicker black, couldn't find a thicker black at the hobby lobby. There was this real thin cording, which you can use cording as a wrap to if you wanted to make a loop on the back side and let it just loop around a button, that would be a good thing to use would be elastic cording. I'm going to do this button, so we just need to decide. Am I about where that needs to be? I'm in the middle? I don't have a ruler here, so we're just going to have to add all that. Then do we want it to go that way or that way. Like that way. Then I'm going to take all and very carefully get in the center of that and hopefully punch all the way through that. That will give me some buttonholes. There we go. I just got a big needle. I actually want to leave a leg sticking out top because I'm going to tie this off on the top. But I am going to go around a couple of times to make sure that button is secure. But I don't want that not on the inside. I don't want it to look terrible because we've got a knot on the inside of our watercolor paper. I want it to look like we've done it this way on purpose. Actually, what I could do is tie it off under that button and then you wouldn't even see the tie. Sometimes you just got to think for a moment. And then all of it comes together for you. On the inside, we've got one little line, but we won't have a big tie off piece, which is what I'm going for. Once you get that, thread it under the button, is what I'm going to do. I could have tied it off right on top, but I think I'm going to tie it off underneath. Just going to wrap that thread around the button a couple of times and then tie it off underneath and trim my extra. Now I've got a lovely button closure that I'm super excited that I found a use for and just cut off that, and now we have a butt enclosure on our book, even after we finished it, and it's gorgeous. Then Could have had that underneath the button closure. What I might do is start it right up underneath it with a tab of glue. It starts right there. I definitely could have had that attached and sewed it down. But because I didn't, I'm going to glue it from there, and then I've got this much left over to wrap around it. I think that's what I'm going to do. Creative solutions. But if I'd sewed that down underneath it, that would have been perfect, but I didn't. You just got to start thinking, I could not put all these funny things in here. But I want you to be able to problem solve as you're going. If you see that things that I didn't think of that you're like, yeah, I would have done it this way. It's easy to think of those things when you're not doing it. I want you to be able to creatively problem solve as you're going. If I do something and I'm like, a, don't do this, you've seen it and then you can think when you're making yours, a, I don't want to do that, but how can I fix it if I mess up? There's that. I like it. I'm going to tack it down like right here. I could tack the whole thing down if I wanted, but I'm going to tack it for sure, at least right there, and then that will come around just like that. Then I want to have our pieces at the end, just like I had planned. Let's plan this out here. Look how pretty that is. Are there any other ones? Let's see what the other options. Let's see. Those are pink. Just thinking. Yeah, I think I like those. These we very colorful. Did I want a colorful one? I could use this one here because I did like that one. Put this one. Put that one. I'm filling those. I'm going to go ahead and use this one that we glued. What I'm going to do, actually, I want one that we sow just in case save that one. I'm going to do the sewed ones, and I'm going to go ahead and use the tacky glue because I can really make sure it sticks. There's more glue. I like the amount of glue that is because I'm going to wrap it around this journal base. I want to make sure it stays. I don't think with the glue stick, it would stay. You got to test this stuff on whatever fabric you plan on using. It might not be appropriate for satins and really thin fabrics. I'm using it on muslin, which is a thin fabric, but it's a cotton fabric, and I think it'll dry nicely. Which one do we want to stick here on the center? Definitely wanted this one at the top. Let's plan on that one being like, right there. I need the buttons to be on the spine so that they're not necessarily on the edge. All right. I think right there. All right. I'm going to go ahead and commit that one. Then if I've got pieces hanging off, I can tack that down when I'm done. Let's see. That's where we're going. We're committed. If you've got any glue that comes out, just take your wet wipe, wipe any of that. I'm liking that. I might take a glue stick just on these bits here, that might tack it down for us on the sections. Yeah, that's good. There's, there's a. Here we go. I love it. Oh my gosh, love. Again, I will have to go ahead and let this sit under like some books, and even though I've put buttons and stuff on it, we need to let that sit overnight. But check it out. Oh, my gosh. Then this can just right around that beautifully and be our can't even tell you the satisfaction that you get from making your own beautiful art journals and until you make it, and then you stare at something so beautiful that you made. Such a good feeling. There we go. Now, we've used our lovely clusters on a sketchbook that we can then open and paint in, draw in, whatever. I love it. Ha. Beautiful. I hope you have fun using your lovely clusters on maybe the cover of a book like I did. I'll see you guys back in class. 15. Recap of Projects We Made: Let's do a little recap on some of the stuff that we did in class. I want to talk about a few observations that I had. We started off learning how to sew and glue the binding for our art journals. Just as a recap. This is a partner workshop to the other book workshops that I've done and I love when I got an idea, just riding that idea till it gets even a little more in depth and you move past your initial things that you create and then you're getting things that you're like, Oh, my goodness is amazing. Wide deep dive into ideas and I'd like to bring you along with some of those things. We started off learning to sew and bind if you didn't already see that in one of the other classes. Then we learned how easy it was to make some beautiful snippet rolls and you can decorate these up. To the tens if you need to the nines, however you want to say that, but you could definitely decorate this up and get them really super fancy. Then a lot of the decoration, I don't like to do it so much that you can't see all the interesting parts that you included. Some people really pile it up. If that's your jam, then definitely do that. I like to see the fabric and the texture of the rolls themselves. That's what I find so beautiful. Some of mine, I don't add as many trinkets and decorations. But I think any way that you decide to do it is fine. Then I'm going to wrap mine on these beautiful vintage spools. I think these are like yarn spools or thread spools that we're in a factory. You can find those online or at the antique store. They're pretty readily available around where I live. Those are really fun to use to keep these rolled up and decorative, and then you can sit them out until you're ready to use them look how pretty these are. In that pretty? I love it. It's so pretty. Then we also learned how to make little clusters, which are the bits and pieces left over from all the scraps and the things that you create, and save every tiny little bit, we covered gluing um and look how good the glue is now that we've had it sitting for a while. It's perfect. We covered sewing, we even I just pinned it together. We also looked at paper pieces that were stapled. You can certainly staple fabric pieces, so keep that in mind. Just any way that you want to do that, you don't have to sew to do any of that. These are really fun to use as decorations, tuck ins, things on books. I've used them on the spine of our little flat book here. And it is gorgeous. Look how pretty that is ridiculously beautiful. Then you don't really see much of the velvet spine left under there, but it's under there. The button closure, freak and love it. Look how gorgeous that is with that interesting button closure. We covered using it all to get through your cover if you decide to add a button after the fact. One thing I want to show you that I didn't really talk about with the cluster because I thought about it after the fact is you can make a tiny fabric book. And this was really easy. I made it with just a length of snippet, and then I grabbed some of that fabric. That was that orange fabric I showed you that I had. It's like a felt. I grabbed just a little bit of that and made it just the same length as that piece of snippet roll. Then I sewed it four pages in, and I'm going to use it like two pages each. But I sewed it in just like we sewed our books with just a needle and thread, and this can be a little needle book. How cool is that? Prettiest needle book ever. Then I took one of the little tiny bull clips as the closure and now I have a little needle bag. How cool is that? It's just like a little tiny fabric book. That is super fun. It's a little project that you can do and you can close it in any of the methods that we practiced. But I just wanted to do minimal. I wanted no so basically besides the center. Then now I've got little needles, I can stick in there and I chose to pin two together and have four pages, basically, but you can do those anyway you want to do them. I like the thickness of that filty fabric. Super cute little miniature fabric book made from a snippet. Love it. I didn't want to forget to show you that because I loved it. Then we got into making our books. We made the flat book last and I couldn't find the belt closure still, but then I was so inspired with the button that we added a button on here. Then we can just open that up and use them and it lays flat and they're beautiful and now I can use this to paint abstract paintings and These books are more like for flat stuff, and then my button is my closure with a little extra ribbon. Then we used our little clusters on the end. Overall, this book, I love how this turned out. Then you do when you're using all that glue, want to flatten these overnight. Under a stack of books and not use that till tomorrow. Then we started off with our little inspiration book with a tucke pocket here on the front. I love fuzzy fabrics, and I tried to use fuzzy fabrics where I could. But this is the very first one of these that I was making and thought, Okay, let's make this with some beautiful different papers in here and this I love, and I've got a butten closure on there. Then in class, we made this lovely piece and then I made two more after I turn the cameras off. I made this one with the buckle closure, so you just have to thread your piece of ribbon through that and I used a piece of snippet roll for that. This is the one where we've got the snippet edge, and you can decorate the edge more as you'd like. You can hang ribbons down with bead. Some people do that. You could have had some ribbon coming out from the spine and tied bows and had that hanging down, that would have been pretty. On this book, I got really funky and I did a different back then I did on the front. Then I've got these little pockets on the front that I can then tuck a little piece of art in or a little photograph, or a little p cluster, I can tuck things in the pockets. I love that about the little pocket pieces on the front. I can tuck pretty things in there. Then it closes. This one I haven't even opened because I've let this one dry all night. They are stiff when you start, I do start off when I open these and prime them so that when I get into it, it's not just like a fresh little book that I'm just now trying to open, but I do prime these and bend the spine a little bit because the way that I did it with the tape, and then the glue and I've made it like super tight and sturdy basically. I do prep this through the book, opening it up a little bit and just getting it used to open because it's going to be tight that first time that you try it. Now, this one turned out beautiful and perfect, and I love everything about it. Then off camera, I made these other two books. On this one, I actually used my whole snippet piece as the cover it wasn't wide enough just because a few of my little pieces of fabric from my kit that I got weren't as long as I would have hoped to make a full cover out of on this size book. What I did was I just sewed another piece of fabric on the edge and that gave me enough fabric to then loop around the cardboard cover. I use the belt loop on this one with a piece of velvet ribbon. It works great. You just thread it through. Then this is glued down. Then I put this pretty piece of extra lace as like implying it's threaded through there, but it's actually glued down, and then that loops around the back so that you can then loop it and however fat it gets. This one I did two different covers, a different one on the back than I did on the front. I did a velvet edge because I like the velvet ribbon and it's really pretty. Then different papers in this one than I did in all the other ones. I was mixing it up between watercolor papers and handmade papers. I've got a variety of interesting surfaces in here to paint on and to decorate and to use. I love this green paper. It's pretty reminds me of a sign of type or something that bleached out in the sun. I just think it's beautiful. And so then this one finishes off. It's got several sections, and it turned out beautiful. I loved using the great big snippet piece that I created. Then the third book that I made was this one, I got so inspired with the button closure that we used on the glued book that we did that I got that great big button out of my button box. These came from Hobby Lobby. They're like a natural button or something, is what it was saying on the label, I think. And I love it. So I just did the exact same thing I did here because I already had the cover made, I punched a hole through and sewed it through and then tied it off underneath just like I did on that one. This one because I thought about it on this one. This one I did actually loop the velvet underneath it, so the velvet is sewn through with the button thread. Then it's up underneath. I already had the ribbon on here because I already knew I wanted the ribbon. I wanted an interesting closure, but I wasn't sure what that was. I left enough ribbon hanging off. But because I loved the ribbon on there, I put it up underneath and I used part of our snippet roll right here, which was this pretty one that we created and I use the snippet roll on the edge, and I did do a fuzzy cover on the back. This has a cotton fiber on the front and a fuzzy cover on the back and there are definitely two different sizes when you're looking at them. But I don't mind, but I wanted to point that out. A fuzzy fabric is a lot thicker than that holstery fabric is still super cool. When you open it up, this one has different pages in it also. I had a really fun time. Depleting my handmade paper stash to make all the sections in these books. Love them. This is a fun with lots of papers and choices, too, and this was made with hot press and cold press paper. Then the ribbon because I already knew I wanted it on there, left enough and when I put the button on, it was perfect. Then also besides putting the snippet roll across that pretty fabric, I also glued a piece of lace on top of it. These two pieces are just glued onto the cover. This whole one pretty much could be glued together, glue, glue, glued on there. I did sew the snippet roll and then this was glued and then little button sewing. That was fun. That was a lot of pretty books that we created using the idea of lovely snippets, sc, leftover fabric, making some little clusters. That was a lot of good stuff that we created in class today. I hope you enjoy making some of these, getting creative with some of your leftover bits and creating and using those as part of your books. I can't wait to see what you're creating, I will see you guys back in class. Oh ho 16. Final Thoughts: We wrap up this workshop. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to continue exploring the endless possibilities of fabric in your art journals. You've learned valuable binding techniques and discovered how to use snippet rolls in fabric clusters to create unique and personalized covers. Remember, the skills and creativity you've developed here can be applied to countless future projects. Keep experimenting, have fun with your fabric choices, and let your creativity shine in every journal you create. Thank you for joining me on this creative journey, and I can't wait to see the amazing journals you make.