Layered Legacies: Mixed Media Art Journals Bookmaking Workshop

1. Introduction: Welcome to the world where fabric meets paper in the most artistic ways. In this unique art journal workshop, you'll unleash your creativity through the beautiful craft of journal making. We'll start from scratch, designing an eye catching cover with fabrics, ribbons, and vintage buttons, and select papers that add a personal touch to your creations. I'm Denise Love. I'm an artist and creative educator, and I'm excited to bring you this fun and exciting dive into handmade art journals. Whether you're looking to preserve memories, start a sketchbook, or simply explore new artistic techniques. This class offers the perfect blend of instruction and inspiration to help you craft a journal that's as unique as you are. Get ready to transform ordinary materials into extraordinary keysakes. 2. Class project: For your class project, you'll create a personalized art journal that showcases your unique style and creativity. Start by constructing a fabric sone or no so cover, using your choice of textiles, embellishments, and a closure mechanism that resonates with your artistic vision. Inside, create a collection of papers, whether that be your favorite watercolor paper or a mix of various textures and colors to enhance your journal's purpose, whether for writing, sketching, or mixed media art. Share your process and the finished journal with the class to inspire and get inspired. Oh. 3. Inspiration: Wanted to just tell you a little bit about what took me down the rabbit hole of making a lovely art journals. I started off with the Dana Wakeley Media journal and I shared it in an art hall and when I started using it. They basically sold out worldwide because they no longer make these and apparently I found it at the end of when they were making it. It's a giant journal. It's pretty big. It's like ten by 14 or something like that. It's pretty big. I love that. It was very intimidating. I started in the middle of the book painting to begin with because I was like, if it's in the middle and I mess it up, then it's in the middle, I don't matter. But what I really liked about this journal is it has several different types of paper. It had the watercolor paper and the burlap paper, and it had some craft paper, and it had some canvas. It has different types of paper. It's really gigantic. The big spreads are super big, and I have had such an amazing time painting in this journal that I'm like, Okay, so myself and everybody else that wants one of these now. We need to figure out how to make something like this for ourselves. This is where all of that inspiration started, and I figured out what papers that I like the best and I like the watercolor papers best, but I do like the mix of papers. The Canvas is fun to paint on, but it shrinks and the craft paper is fun to paint on but if you don't seal it before you paint it, then things sink in like a stain rather than sitting on top, like it should, so this has Jess on it and this doesn't. It's a really fun challenge to figure out, what papers do I like? And how do I handle weird papers? If you're looking at weird papers, if you'll just those papers, the burlap too thin to really do much good on that, but all the other papers, if you'll put clear Gesso on them, then they will work out great. If you're using a canvas, the canvas, even with the clear gesso on it is still going to shrink, it shrinks up. A raw Canvas does. But I think that's cool that it's shorter in the book when it's done, so I don't even care. This is my original journal that I'm still working in. It's been my dream when I see other people with their finished art journals to be jealous and I want that too, and so I've started working almost finished with this one. I've got a section in the back and then a few pieces up front that I left because I was like, maybe by the time I'm really good and going, I'll be not afraid of these front pages anymore. I've had a really fantastic time painting in that. My version of that was the first book workshop, the Artisanal journals that I made, and I did it with the craft paper, and I did it with some other pieces in here, not just canvas, I used a linen. Because the craft paper is not my favorite, I did not use it in every I didn't use it in the same quantity that's in my original book. I did one piece of burlap, and then I only had one piece of the craft paper in each section, and then I did one piece of canvas and then when I got to the section back here, I had that other piece of linen. I changed it up a little bit. This book is about 2 " shorter than the one I was just showing you. It is a tiny bit smaller by about that much and by about this wide. Man, what a fantastic size. I'm still thrilled with this size. I like the watercolor pages the most. I put more watercolor pages and less of the original inspiration pages, and that's where we started with this bookmaking journey. Then I made myself another one of these books made with different handmade papers because I love the handmade papers. I'm obsessed with them. I've been buying them for a long time and storing them, thinking, I'm going to do something amazing with this. Then I didn't know what that amazing thing was going to be. But now, I'm like, this is why I was saving those and collecting those and I was even at the art store last week and had bought some more, and my friends like, what are you going to do with those? I'm like, I don't know, but I need them. Now I've used almost all of them. This was the next thing that I did for myself, and then I made the second book workshop from scrap to treasure, where we jumped into a whole otherther collection of interesting art journals, including making some with old book covers and stuff like that. Then that's what led me to this third companion workshop is working with some fabric because I've seen some lovely fabric covers out there. You can look at handmade journals on Instagram and Pinterest and you see lots of beautiful handmade fabric journals. I thought, that would be a great companion and third version of the book with a lovely fabric. Cover. That is what led to this workshop because I'm like, I want to use some of these treasures that are stashed around my house for years and years and years and some of them I've used in photography, and some of them I've collected since before that. Some of these things are 30-years-old, and some of them are brand new that I got out the hobby lobby like this blue fabric in here that might not match as well as it did when I had initially come up with my idea because there was a different color on the spine. But I love it so much. It's the most beautiful cover. It's beautiful on the back. See the edge, and I would not have made this for myself if I weren't making a workshop because sometimes I just won't get to it. Then this one I thought I want some other handmade papers in here and some different pieces to inspire and excite me. That was a piece left over and I thought that could be a bookmark, a little snippet roll there. This one has different lovely papers in it, and I've almost used my handmade paper supply, and I'm like, I might need to go back to the **** Blick and look at their papers some more. But this one has lots of watercolor papers to paint on it. If you're going to paint on handmade papers like I've done in this book, I've got a beautiful pattern on one side that I would not consider painting on top of, but maybe the backside needs something else. Again, I would use clear Gesso on that. Then let it dry and then it would be ready for whatever you wanted to do on top of that. Have a thing of clear so handy. Look at this pretty paper. It's like tissue paper. I tore it crooked and I don't even care because I might come in and just really tear this extra short. I don't even worry about things being perfect or things being exact. I think the imperfections are what make this so beautiful. Then I even put the snippet from the other cut off on the other end, I glued it in here, and then look at this. We can actually slip some pins and things in here to keep with our book if we needed to, how fun is that? So I had a lovely button and a fun closure. Then that led me to want to use this beautiful red fabric that is an antique fringe fabric that I got off of Ladies selling it. This one, beautiful, different binding with the velvet and then the little pieces that come around. Look how beautiful that fabric is. It's so gorgeous. I love it so much. This one, I have a few painted pieces in here, and I decided I wanted it to be all watercolor paper. I'm going to make it just a big abstract journal of things I paint, but they're all watercolor papers in here. Yummy for that one. Then I love the wrap around ribbon things. That's why this one also has a lovely ribbon to wrap around it. Then I thought, a little one that we could tote with us, this idea of using grommets on the edge to bind was super fun. I hope that you enjoy where this inspiration came from and how I got to where I got to. I just want to show you a few books that you could reference. I did share these in the other two workshops, but I want to just if you didn't see those, I don't want you to miss them, some lovely books for ideas and I've got Kaylee Gray G messy art. This one is a beautiful book with inspiration. Then you've got some artists and their books. I love looking at stuff like this because I'm like, that's very inspiring, I love the colors. I love the way they've done some layouts. I've got some inspiration things in here and some ideas. I just love looking at stuff like this. I'm really inspired by something like this in this color palette. I love this, which is Robin Marie Smith. I actually have been on her Instagram and pinned some pinterest things because I just love these colors, S's in there. It's a book of different artists and their journals and what they've done. Very inspiring book, I love this one. I also have handmade books at home, and this is a beginner's guide. Now, it's almost easier and you may be a person that follows graphics and things really easily. I think it's almost easier to watch a video and see how somebody's putting a book together and then getting a basic idea of, I've seen the process. Now I'm ready to dive deeper and get some other ideas and see how I can level up my game because my game is Not perfection. I don't want it perfect. I'm fine if pages stick out, I don't have to have everything be perfect, I want it to be beautiful, but it can be beautiful and imperfect. Then some of these get really precise. I took book classes years ago and made a book, and it was one of those five day free things that was going to lead you to a membership thing and the lady made everything really seem so difficult. By the time I made the one book, I was like, not for me. But I think that knowledge just lived in my mind, and I pick up, I'm handy, I pick up stuff very easily. Then when I wanted to make my own big journal like the one they've sold out of worldwide, I just instinctively knew, here's how I'm going to make this, and it just came to me. Then once that idea came to me, 50 other ideas came to me and that's how we've ended up with three of these little workshops so far and I'm not even saying I'm done. I could put another couple of projects together and say, Okay, here's another lovely set of ideas for you because I just love to make things. I love coming up with ideas and when you're generating ideas, they just seem to flow and flow and flow. This book, treasure treasure bookmaking is another good idea book with lots of ideas and things that step outside the box. Most of my journals, I have stuck with papers that I want to paint on because I want these for painting, but who's to say later that I don't go full on junk journal and put vintage papers and everything and want to do some of the ideas that are coming up in some of these books. This one is Treasure bookmaking by Natasa Marcin Covic. I know I said that wrong, sorry, but I will link everything below. Then another book here is this making handmade books, 100 plus binding structures and forms? This is not a beginner book. I don't even think it gives good instructions. This is where I was saying, if you follow the graphics, when you're making stuff really easily. Maybe this would be an okay book for you to have and start with, but I think that's difficult. Then sometimes you see that they've left to step out somewhere and I don't understand how they got to the end or whatever. If you will take and make a few books with some basic binding techniques, then I think a book like this can help you level up your game because you're like, now I got the basics. I understand what These first diagrams are doing and I think I can follow the rest. This would not be a beginner book, but I do like looking through all the ideas. That's making handbag books, 100 plus bindings. I like telling you that that was not a beginner book. This book, I go through those two, This book is creative Wonderust, and this is by Kasia Avery. I might have said that wrong, but This lady has lovely art things and classes and stuff and lots of beautiful ideas here in making some journals also. I thought wonderful and it takes you through whole layouts inspiring your layouts to help you finish the journals. If you need help and ideas for your pages and stuff, she's got lots of good ideas for painting the pages, and it does at the beginning, start off with making your books to to get started so that you've got a little bit of journal making in here, and then you've got lots of ideas to follow. This is a nice, creative, lovely book also. I hope you enjoy making books with me. This is the third of the set of workshops where I'm just advancing each time into more decorative covers and then we get into sewing. This is a noS one where we didn't sew anything. We glued everything, but it's just as beautiful. Don't feel like you have to have a sewing machine to do this workshop. Um, because this one is just as good. Alright, so I hope you enjoy working in class with me and creating beautiful journals, and I will see you there. 4. Sewn Cover - Supplies: Let's talk about the supplies that we're going to use to make our fabric covered journal. I have created this with some fabric, and I have done that with some linen fabric that I got at the Di blk and there's two layers of that. You need enough linen or cotton fabric or duct or drop cloth or anything that you're going to use as that inside cover. You need enough for two layers of that. Then I have picked out a colorway. I have dug through 30 years of different things that I've collected in the drawers around my house and my grandmother's button box, and I pulled out fabrics, and I pulled out a couple colorways. I ended up making this one in this class, but here's another colorway that I pulled out, I thought was interesting. With different reds and cheese cloth. If you don't want to go buy a bunch of fabric, but you want a bunch of choices to play with cloth napkins. Genius like this is a cloth napkin that I used in steel life photography, and I absolutely love it. I think it make a super cool pattern on a journal cover. They're nice and thick and they're like anony they're thick, so I like those. Look at cloth napkins for some super fun choices for fabrics without having to buy larger pieces of it, and they're nice thickness and weight. I like this. I've got cheese cloth in different colors because I happened to have it. You could have five or six napkins, you could have a couple of fabrics like this because what I ended up doing was two layers of fabric, and then some cheese cloth layers and then velvet ribbons. I like the velvet ribbons and I match up to that. You just need enough to cover the whole thing. Then I actually had some fun burlap ribbon for the spine that I used, but you could just do ribbons all the way around. You don't have to have the bur lap. You could also had extra wide, some type of ribbon like this could have been like a spine. Just trying to give you some choices here. Then I like buttons. I did a button closure on this one and then I covered it up at the last minute and it's going to be able to have a ribbon wrap around it to hold the book closed as it gets fatter and fatter. So I liked fun buttons. These were my grandmother's buttons out of her button box. Who knows how old these are because she was collecting buttons since 1940. Every outfit that had buttons on it, she saved the extra button. She'd have it if a button fell off and then she bought buttons and some of these are super old. That was really fun. Whatever you're going to do for the cover, get creative with your fabric choices and pick several that would maybe go together, but maybe aren't all Matchi Matchi possibly. That would be fun. That is considerations for say a cover. I went color theme. This is like red and cher shade. This was the green and blue. You'll also possibly need some book binding glue. I did a little glue at the end. I did not use it on the actual cover itself. I sewed with just a plain zigzag stitch on this. You don't have to sew, you could glue everything down and if you're going to do that, test out the glue you're going to use. Maybe a glue stick would be a better choice because real liquidy glues you're going to soak through the fabrics. Do some little tests there. With whatever glue that you have it might work out better for a fabric glue or maybe a glue stick. You're just going to have to test the waters there if you're not going to sew. Then you also need whatever your favorite paper is going to be. I chose to use the A three coti paper. One package is all I needed, and I still had some leftover. I used five of those per signature, five, ten, 15, 20, really I used all 20 sheets now that I count that because I did two pieces of cody paper I did one handmade paper, and then I did two pieces of cody papers, two here, and then I did a handmade paper, and then I did a cody paper for the center. That's how many pieces are in each signature, and I did four signatures. I used one piece of the cotton paper, 20 sheets, and then I did two handmade papers in each section because I love the handmade papers and I have a big collection, but I've just been collecting and I'm like, I want to do something great with these one day. This is the thing that these were meant for, and so I am just using up my stash and almost feel like, Oh, no, I need to go to the art store and get some more papers because I'm almost out. I've almost used them all. But then I'm like, what am I going to use those for? More books, probably, but these make gorgeous papers. To use this, I almost would paint a piece of art here. And you could collage on top of this, you could leave this just like it is, and I tend to want to maybe leave the handmade papers as they are because they're beautiful. But some of them might get painted on. If you're going to paint on them, I would do a clear eso over the surface of whatever you've used if it's down newspaper, old piece of old papers, like vintage papers or whatever, tissue paper, T bag paper. I got some T bag paper. Didn't end up using it in here. But any of those odd surfaces. Burlap Canvas, craft paper. The clear Gesso will prep that surface and make it ready for you to paint on it. Just keep those in mind. If you're wondering how would you paint on these, you would clear Gesso on each side that you were going to paint on like this right here, I'll just leave and try to compliment it over here. Then each section is separate in the book because it's actually sewn to the cover. Then you get to the back. I have used a little bit of our runoff scrap to glue down our ribbon, and if it's thick enough, you see you don't see the glue come through on either side, that's great. I've left a tiny bit of a gap here between the two sections. I glue it here here and here to glue this in. I can now store pins and things. I can have a little pin storage to take with me. How cool is that? I love it. Then the button, I'm letting the button dry. It's still wet, but then this will loop around and hold it closed. You also need. Any decorations consider anything pretty like that, if you've got an old button or an old pin. My grandmother had some beautiful old pins. I almost used one of those instead, but I didn't. You also need some bookbinding tools. You need the waxed thread or If you're going to wax it yourself, you need the bees wax and say like a linen thread, which I like this way better. I'm sticking to the waxed thread. You need an all. You need some gigantic embroidery needles and a bone folder. This is the $7 Amazon kit. That I got that I absolutely love. I have a separate all, I have a separate bone folder. I had some needles, but I thought this is fantastic. I've got some threads in other colors. But for $7, this is my favorite. Now I'm just using it all the time. I'm going to give you a link to this one and a little bit larger kit because I've actually ordered myself the larger kit. It has rounded needles and some other thread colors, and I was like $13 for everything in it because it also includes some of this. I thought best deal ever, best deal ever. Definitely need your book binding tools. You need some scissors. If you're going to sew, pick a thread and you need your sewing machine, but pick a thread that matches the color theme that you're going with. With this, I used a green thread so that it wasn't hopping off the page at me, going black or white or whatever it blended in. The goal here is not perfect. This is not perfect, but I love it, and it's perfect to me. I'm a happy camper and then there's the backside. It's just going to be loved and be and more beautiful the older it gets. I love this. That is how we make journal with a fabric cover and a closure. There's lots of interesting things you could use as closures. I chose a button and some lovely spool of ribbon there. All right, so let's get started. 5. Sewn Cover - Choosing Fabrics: This journal, I'm going to do a fabric cover, and so I'm showing you here what I have been digging out of my closets and my cabinets, and some of these fabrics I've had for literally 30 years, because when I was in school, I hook interior design. I got a degreed interior design, but when I went to school starting out, I was going to do fashion design. I've always like sewing and my grandmother was a big sewer and she paid all the clothes for my aunts and uncles and my mom. The whole time they were growing up, my mother didn't even have a store bought shirt until she was in high school, and she asked for one because all the other kids in school had a store bought shirt. I've always had an interest in sewing, but once I got to college and actually had to sew stuff, like real stuff. I decided I really didn't like to sew. I like to make fun things. The thing that I like to make the most was fur blankets. I've always got a little bit of fur hanging out because my grandmother had this fur blanket in the 70s and absolutely loved it. It was like my favorite blanket at her house. One side was fur and one side with some random fabric that she had that was really ugly in 1970s, burnt orange and gold, I'm sure. That's That's what it was in my memory with some weird zig zag pattern. But I loved it so much. It's like my grandmother had the million dollar idea and didn't put it out there in the world before fur blankets were a thing and you can get them at every store on every corner now, she had the fur blanket. There for years, in my early 20s, I made fur blankets for everybody for Christmas, and everybody had fur blanket that I made. So I've always got a little bit of fur hanging out. I've always got some fabric scraps and things. I pulled out just random upholstery fabrics that I have saw and thought, Oh my gosh, I love that. What am I going to do with it? I can make pillows out of it and obviously I never did. I got into twi one time. I was obsessed with it, so I had several pieces of pretty twi fur. Et's move this out of the way a little bit. I've got some just Canvas, burlap in green. I wish I had remembered I had green burlap when I was making this beautiful art journal here because when I made these, I made the handmade papers. Then this was another one with the handmade papers. I wish that I had remembered that when I made that first one right here from our inspiration thing, I wish I had remembered that I had green burlap because I put burlap in this book. If I remembered I had green, so cool. Maybe the next art journal might get a green burlap because I don't even remember I had that. I don't even know why I had that. I just thought it was pretty I guess. That's really fun. But let me tell you an idea that I had as I was digging through stuff. If you're not a fabric collector or you don't have a bunch of fabrics, then you're like, Oh, I don't know if I want to go and buy a bunch of fabric or whatever. I don't know how to get a bunch of fabric or I don't want to go to the fabric store and buy yards of fabric to make one or two art journals for myself. Napkins. Oh, my goodness. Now Now I want all the napkins. I have a bunch of napkins. I had this one that I just found. I had this one that I found, which I'm in love with. I like the crazy ones and this one spoke to me. It was a photography prop. I used it in steel life setups, and you can go to TJ Max and get all kinds of amazing napkins, cloth napkins. These are the perfect size for getting small squares out of or a ribbon of fabric out of. Without having to buy yards and yards of fabric. Cloth, napkins, perfect idea. I was already gathering up my ideas and pairing up some color ways. In the one that I have sitting over here, and I'm going to move the camera for a second. But this one, I just put out a piece of linen onto my table, which is what this fabric at the bottom is because I'm thinking that's going to be the base of my cover. Then I started pulling together a few of those tails that I just had showed you. I had a few more. I was thinking that maybe the t could be part of a stripe pattern on this book. Maybe I could have stripes and then the spine could perhaps be something like this talla ribbon that I had found that I used for steel life. I have a couple of colored bur laps and I'm like, I don't think I actually ever actually used these because I never took the little tags off. I think this was something I got near the end of really being serious about doing the photography like I was. I've just got random beautiful things. I was thinking it could be maybe stripes of stuff and that stuff could be maybe some of these tills in the right colors. I'm thinking blue green since those are blue greens. Then I had some velvet ribbon That could be another stripe. I had that in the teal and I had that in green, I'm thinking stripes. Then I also had some cheese cloth in the most delicious color, which is a photography prop also, but I'm going to sacrifice a little sliver of it. I got little threads everywhere. I'm going to sacrifice a little sliver of it to be part of my art journal cover. Then I also had some cheese cloth here in a lovely cream. I'm thinking blue green cover, different stripes of stuff. Same set of stripes on the front of it as on the back of it, and maybe this burlap piece as the spine. I was just laying out ideas here. Then I was thinking it would be cool to have a button closure. I have my grandmother's button box, which is nice baker light from the 1950s. But my grandmother was the person that saved all the buttons that came on clothes when they had an extra button. Or she would buy buttons that she loved. Or if a button fell off of a garment, she would save those buttons. So I have dug through the buttons because I found this hobby lobby when I was looking for different other things and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I love these buttons. But for some reason, they're not grabbing me with my blue green journal, and I could still use them, but out of my grandmother's button box. Who knows how the stuff is? I found this super fun button that I think I actually like and might use. It's not as fun a color as that tal, but I think it blends better with the feel of the fabrics. Also found a really fun wood button, a fun, dark charcoali, deep deep brown. I wouldn't call it quite black, but it could look black on camera. Another brown button, an ivory colored old button, which might be nice as a contrast. I pulled a few buttons out and I'm feeling like this is one colorway. Then I'm going to show you a second colorway of stuff I dug out. This was another color way. I found another great color of cheese cloth in my stash of fabric for photography. It's a great color. I liked it because went with M napkin that I loved. I'm thinking those colors and I also loved this fabric. I might even use some of that fabric or I might not. This is vintage fabric from France that I got from an EtS seller a while back because I just absolutely loved it more than anything. I may or may not use that. I was pulling out different fabrics and ideas. That could be my fabric for my little hero fabric or this one could. I'm just going to have to look at those and decide. I've got some lovely gold ribbon, velvet. I like the velvet ribbons. I've got some other velvet ribbons in some good colors that might blend. I've just pulled them out to have them available and then another cheese cloth in a beautiful gold. Pulled out the button box and I was looking at the different buttons and look button. That's the greatest button ever and I'm not even a yellow person, but I do love gold. Now I'm thinking, I love this button and I found a cool pink button, but I'm really feeling like this button is going to be the ticket. Looking at these and thinking and deciding. This could be the first one I was thinking a striped pattern. This one could be even a patchwork pattern and what makes me think of that. In my stash of stuff, and I've had this for 25 years, I found some patchwork fabric that's already made. That you could then do something with and I absolutely love this also. It was sold by the yard years ago. But I just loved it. I was thinking that's a patchwork fabric, and I actually have this lovely brown volure feeling. It's a velvety feel that might make a nice combination with this lovely patchwork stuff. I actually made a blanket with fur on the other side out of this with that fur that I showed you actually, the front of the blanket is this. And the back of the blanket is that fur. Then it was so lovely and so beautiful that I have not used it. It's not one that I put out and actually use because I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is the most beautiful thing ever and I have saved it. I need to. As I get older, the less I save things, and I need to get that out and just make it a blanket that we use because it's so beautiful. But I was thinking, I like this patchwork idea. We could do that patchwork idea with something like this. I don't know that I would put this in there, but I might I don't know, I might look around and see what else we could do besides just what I've pulled, but I like what I've pulled and I could do a lot of it in that fabric. Just trying to give you some ideas of different things that you can start searching out for your fabric stash and things that you might make a cover out of. You might have a whole bunch of stashed fabric or you may have none. If you have none, then I would definitely start looking for napkins because they're affordable, they're not too big, you're not going to have to store giant yards of fabric and pick Maybe three that you could or if you're going to do stripes all the way down, say 1 " stripes down the cover, it would depend on how big that cover is and of course, you could repeat your stripes, but at least three patterns, I think, to do your cloth. Maybe a button for a button closure, maybe some ribbons to match also and just see what you can come up with. These are the ones I'm thinking of. What we need to do first, before we can cut out a cover, we need to decide what size we're going to make and pick our papers and fold our papers and make our signatures. I'm thinking maybe two to three signatures of your favorite papers, and I'm going to get some of those out and start thinking about that. But start thinking favorite papers, favorite vintage, things, handmade papers? Anything that we've used to make some of our art journals here that I'm using to paint in and stuff? I'm making the same type of thing, but with a lovely fabric cover instead of a handmade paper cover. Start thinking papers. What's your favorite thing to paint on? What textures do you want in there? Do you want to have handmade papers or do you want to go ahead and have things painted? Because you could paint everything first, and then assemble a book because after I put this book together, I actually used a painting in here. Look at how gorgeous it is, and now you don't have to worry about messing up your book pages and stuff. If you've already painted a whole bunch of pages and you're assembling a finished book basically. I think on a book that I'm going to create, I'm going to paint on my favorite paper, I'm going to paint both sides. Of several pieces and then intersperse those with handmade papers and maybe a few papers that I could paint because in this journal, I only included one pre painted piece and now I'm like, why don't I do more? Because man, that turned out fantastic. Just things to think of as we're going forward. I'm going to get some paper and start deciding on my signatures and you can see where I'm thinking with the fabric, but I need to know what size my signatures are going to be before we can decide what size our journal cover is, then we can decide how many elements we need in that cover. Let's do that next. Let's talk about papers. You can put any papers in your journals that you want. I want to use these as things that I paint in for big abstract journals. That's just what I'm thinking. I want to use the handmade papers. I love that. I love that my cover is going to be fabrics that have some meaning to me. Then I'm going to have some watercolor pages using my ti paper because I like it and it's affordable compared to say some more expensive papers, but you can use any paper you want. Especially if you have some big sheets of watercolor paper, like the great big 22 by 30 sheets, then you could cut tear like different sizes out of it. I'm going to go with this. I've pulled some fun handmade paper choices that I had my dish. Let me tell you after making all these books, I'm finally working my way through the dish of all these papers that I collected, that one day I was going to do something with, I can't even tell you how good that feels. But I like this crinkle paper. This paper was amazing. In the other books that I created. Let me just pull one down. I did one book that had the same things in every signature. We just pull the other one down. Had some linen in here, and then the next section had like a burlap, and then the next section had a piece of Canvas, so I made it different in every section. I really loved that. That was from our inspiration journal that just pushed me down on this little rabbit hole, which was the Dina Wakeley journal that they no longer make. I wanted to have Other choices, but this is where that inspiration started. This had craft paper in it, it had watercolor paper in it, and it had burlap in it, and I had Canvas in it. That's where I started with my inspiration and I made one that was very similar that I can then continue to use in paint in when I fill up the journal that I have now been painting in for a good six months at least covering up all the different pages with different painting and different surfaces. I like having different surfaces because it makes you think outside the box and get outside your comfort zone and figure out, how can I paint on this very loose weave surface versus a canvas that's sitting right next to it or a watercolor paper. I liked having those challenges. I like big double spreads of watercolor paper, and then I liked having a spread where maybe two different surfaces. I've had a whole lot of fun working on all the different surfaces in my inspiration journal here. Now I want a whole bunch more going forward, but maybe customized in different papers that I love. Here's where my little journey of the bookmaking started. I did bookmaking years ago and made, I'll show you the one I made. I made this little book and this is like book cloth, and it's got little signatures in it and little signatures have a wrap around so that it's like little individual books in the book, but when it's closed, it's real pretty. I made it. The instructor was very exact and precise and you had to do it just like this or that. Just even making the one book was almost not fun because it almost seemed too difficult. When I was making these, I was not as precise. I'm precise enough that it looks amazing, but I wasn't so precise that I was like, I'll never make another one again. After I made this, I was so inspired that I'm like, I need to make some more. I hope that I give you that same amount of excitement for bookmaking, or at least making these amazing art journals because I've loved it so much that we're now working on a third companion workshop, doing this workshop with some others because I cannot wait to be digging into these, but I'm so inspired for making these that I'm like, let's keep making while I'm in the mood to make and then I may not make another book the rest of my life because I've got enough to last me for 15 years. But man, I can't even tell you how excited I get to look at these and to tell everybody about the journals that I've made that before I put these out, I'm like, I have nobody to tell, so I tell my best friends and I'm like, Look how amazing these are, and I get so excited, I can't even tell you because they're so gorgeous and you can see once you start painting in them, how they could offset different papers. I don't worry about the different papers either because I can either leave it like that because it's a handmade paper, that's why I like the handmade papers. If you make paper, make some papers to do this with, So they're very textural and interesting in themselves. Next to say a complimentary painting that you do with it. But I could also just put Gesso on that and I can paint on top of that or I can glue things on top of that, I could make collage work on top of that and make that work. I choose to make my treasure journals out of these treasured pieces of paper that I've now collected for quite some time. I've just collected them and thought, I'm going to do something great with these one day. I never knew what that was. This is what it is. These are the things that are going to be great. I've also pulled I'm thinking in the blue. I'm thinking that I'm going to make the blue green cover this time because I'm feeling that. Then I was thinking it might be nice inside to have some of the blue papers that I've collected rather than the rainbow of papers I did in that last book. Maybe some blue papers in there will be fun. I also have some t bag paper and I'm like, it's basically big sheet of t bag. That wasn't made into a T bag. That's going to be super delicate, but it might be a fun as one page option in the book just because. I pulled that out of my closet. Then textural elements. I like textured ones too. I might use these texture ones. I've just pulled out some choices. I don't know which ones are actually going to go in the book, but I thought let's just get some different choices out here. Some of your choices might be Jelly prints that you've printed. If you make some big jelly prints, especially, or this might be the chance that you've wanted to have a reason to make big jelly prints, those can be your handmade papers or your painted things. It could be newspaper, it could be old vintage papers. It could be just all watercolor book, if you like. That watercolor paper, but you don't want to do different types in there. You could do all watercolor paper and then it's ready for you to use and paint in. That's another good choice. This one, I have some watercolor books that I made already in the other class. We had and I had a fabric cover in that one, but we didn't actually sew this cover. In this class, we're sewing the cover. But I did have one that just made of watercolor and all watercolor paper. That's really a nice thing to do. You could also make these covers to slip on like you could have a pocket and slip that down in there if you wanted to be able to change the cover out or change books out of the cover, you could make it with a pocket. I'm going to make it a permanent one, but just throwing more ideas out there at you. What we're going to do is we're going to have to decide what size paper? Do I want it to be the full size? I'm using the A three ti paper. And this size, if I leave it like the full size, it's a book this size, which is a pretty good size. It's a tiny bit smaller than the original inspiration book by about an inch and inch and a half. It's a little tiny bit smaller and this is a big book. But this is big enough. I'm happy with this size. I think it's like a ten by 12 isis. Let me grab a ruler and I can tell you what size that is. When we're done, this will be the approximate size. It's approximately 9 " by 12.5 ". Nine by 12. You see that's a pretty good size. I'm going to go ahead and go for it. I'm going to do the big sheets. This pack of paper comes with 20 sheets of paper, which is plenty for one journal because this journal only took one pack of paper and there were some extras. This journal took three quarters of a pack of paper. This journal again, took three quarters of a pack of paper. They don't take a whole pack. You end up with usually a sheet or two leftover. Depending on how big you want to make it, this one I made a little bit bigger and I had one, two, three, four, five signatures in it. Because I'm like, I love that, I want to make it even bigger, whereas the original one has four signatures in it. You can see how much thicker there you get with one extra signatures. If you're wanting something to work in for a while, use as many sheets as you need. Basically, too, what I had decided on those signatures was six sheets. I had two sheets of watercolor paper because when I made these, I'll show you. I made this one, and I had one sheet of watercolor paper and then a sheet of handmade paper, and then two sheets of watercolor paper. I attached the original first sheet of watercolor paper to the spine to be the opening page of the book, and then that made a handmade paper, my first page. That's interesting. But wanted that first page to be watercolor paper. If you do two sheets of watercolor paper, that sheet that maybe is going to attach to the spine and this sheet, if you're doing a hard cover, then you have something to go with before your first paper or whatever it is that you put in there, get started. Now, because we're doing a cloth cover, We're not actually going to attach that watercolor paper to the spine in the same way. But I still want it to be two watercolors and then a decorative paper, and I'm just going to take scissors to cut these down to the right sizes and then or my rip ruler, which you know I love my rip ruler. Let me go grab that. My dual edge ripper, is my favorite rip ruler. It's about two feet, long decod edge ruler. Basically what you do is you line up this to where you want it, and then tear your paper towards the ruler holding the ruler down as you go. And now we are going to get a handmade torn edge on our papers to match the handmade torn edge on our paper that I've selected that I'm going to use. That's another reason why I like using this paper because it's got the handmade paper edge. And it is a weird cotton watercolor to paint on, but once you paint enough on it, it becomes fun. The way I like to paint with acrylic paint and watercolor and lots of different stuff like that, I'm not just painting with one medium. I have found that this is very versatile and I ended up liking the cloth feel of the paper. That's why I pick that. It's like say $34, I think this past time when I've been buying these to make these journals. So Where did I just put that rip rower? I just lost it. Oh, it's clear, so it's right there. But if you've got 20 sheets and it only takes one to do a great big journal, you can see how affordable that could be because if you're thinking $34 is a lot, the handmade journals are just expensive or more. When you're buying them, I think those Dina Wakeley ones were around $40, but they're making thousands at a time when they made these. This is called cream texture stripe deco paper, handmade in Nepal. Most of these handmade papers are made in Nepal. Yeah. Then that's my next page. Look how beautiful that paper is. And then I might do another handmade. Another watercolor sets one, two, three, four, five. I might put seven sheets because the handmade papers are so thin. Let's do this one. So, when you go to buy those, they were like $40. And so you could probably get away with about $40 in materials, but if you're going to make something that's truly custom for you, you might end up spending a bit more, but still fairly reasonable for making a one of a kind handmade art journal for yourself. Especially one that's completely customized to something that you love. Oh, my goodness. I can't wait. With that. There we go. Once you decide what size is your paper, what papers that you're going to use. Then you're going to have to put all those signatures together. Now I've got two pieces of watercolor paper, one, two, I've got a handmade paper, and then I've got two pieces of watercolor paper, and then I've got a handmade paper, and then I'm going to have a center be the watercolor paper. Once I get my signatures done, I'm going to need to fold them in half. They're not all going to line up perfectly, and that's what I like about it. So we're going to fold that in half, and then we're going to line all of them up together to get our thickness. So I'm going to go ahead and get my other signatures made, and so I'll be right back. 6. Sewn Cover - Creating & Sewing Cover: Now, I have four sections made because I think I'm going to do four, but we'll see how big that makes it. I'm taking my bone folder and really flattening out the spine with all my weight so that it lays flatter. On this one, I've used a paper that comes outside the spine like all these little scragglies. I love that. That does not bother me that that does that. If it bothers you, you can cut those off if you use a paper like that, but I'm good with that. I like it. I like the imperfectnes of it. All right, that and then the fourth one. Again, I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking for just something cool when I'm done. Let's see how thick that makes. That's thick. That gives us a good thickness there. Now, I think what I'm going to do is have the base of my cover be this linen. This is the linen that I got at the Blick. It was called Belgian Belgian linen, type 66 j, unprimed, extra smooth, and it was a 54 inch by 1 yard piece, 8.8 ounces. Medium weight. It says, medium weight, tight single weave construction, 92 threads per square inch, ideal for realism portraiture. It's a linen that you paint on basically. But since I got it at the art store, it was convenient for me to buy a piece of it for book pages and I didn't put a linen book page in here. I could have, but I didn't. I'm just going to give myself some extra space here as I'm measuring this out. I'm giving myself a little extra room here to think and I can see if I go ahead and fold this over that I've got plenty of fabric if I go ahead and cut that. On this side of this fold. I'm just giving myself some extra room and we'll trim some of this down. But I don't want to be stuck with not enough. There we go. Then I will just set the rest of that to the side. This is going to be the base of what I'm doing because I've already got a fold here, that might be on the spine. Let's just look at where that puts us. It puts us about right here. So I could trim that down to about there and the same on the other side, or I could move it down because it doesn't really matter and then we're not wasting it. Just trying to give myself enough up here, but not so much that now I've got too much to work with. I'm going to just flip it over. And then I know exactly where we've ended up here. I'm going to give myself a good 2 " to work with. If you're a sewer and I'm making you cringe, by giving myself extra space, I'm sorry. Now that's going to be the gist of my cover, and now I'm ready to set this to the side for now because we're going to be sewing these directly to the cover once it's finished. Now we need to decide which one's going to be the inside. I actually like this texture. But we're going to cover up both sides, so it doesn't even matter. Now I'm thinking that it's time to figure now. I was thinking I wanted this for the spine. I'm just going to go ahead and cut out a length for that that would work. And then we're just going to play and experiment with the different fabrics and stuff, until we get a layout that we love. I was thinking one stripe in this velvet. I just give myself some of that. I was thinking a stripe in this velvet green, maybe even two stripes in the green. Yeah, I'm feeling that we might get two stripes out of the green because it's thinner. That's not the final layout here. I'm just getting my thoughts together. Then we've got these lovely options. I was thinking a cream stripe. Let's just see, is that wide enough? Do I want to pull it like that to sew that in? I could do that, I could do that. Then I'm only sacrificing the end. Instead of the whole thing. Because there's plenty to do that. Let's just cut off a little bit of the end here. And then the rest of this can still be a photography prop. If you're one of my photo people. I know you're going. That's pretty cheese cloth though. It's a stretchy, pretty ivory color. I like that I picked the edge with the f on it. I did that on purpose. I might cut a little bit of the fray off, but I did that on purpose. I like these little edges that do this. Once we've got enough stripes, then we can play with the order, and then we see how stretchy that is. There we go, look at that and then we can pull this to the top because that's going to be on top of it in my mind. Really, might as well just pull that out. Then I like this green, so I'm thinking the same thing, cut off an end. Let's just do it because I love the texture, and I might trim it down again, but I'm going to start with enough just to see or we could crunch it up. It could be texture. I like the texture and the color. When we're attaching, I'm going to be I'm going to sew these on, but if you don't want to sew, you could use glue. Yeah, that's plenty. Then we've still got enough space here that we need to decide on a fabric stripe. It goes to about right there. I could either leave this salvage edge on there, or come to the other end or I could trim it off either way. This actually has people on it. Do we just want the implication of whatever it was and have the pattern, or are we trying to get some design in there? I'm just trying to get the implication of what it was. I don't want to get the people necessarily. I'm going to cut myself. Large enough strip to just think here. You can see why having napkins would be a good choice because then you've got lots of choices. You don't have to lock yourself into a yard of fabric or whatever. This is about a quarter of yard, I think. I'm sure the poor soul that I tortured cutting lots of little pieces of fabric really appreciated me coming that day. But that's why they're there to cut you some samples and stuff, right? Now we've got some little texture going. It's not perfectly cut straight, but it's enough for me to straighten it out. Then I've got this blue one and I've got this green one. Feeling like this green is a little crazy. Is it even long enough? It's not even long enough. There we go. Totally solved that problem, didn't it? Now, I need to get my rotary cutter out, make it easier to cut this. Now, another tall. Don't want that in there? Why not? Why not? I'm just going to cut myself a big enough strip. To decide on. Well, see this got people all in it. Do I want legs of people? Or do I want legs of people over here? I like, you know what? Yeah, Maybe I just want legs of people with sheep heads. Is what it is. Let's just cut ourselves a strip of this. Is the color more than anything that I wanted? Is that long enough? Yes. Yes, it is. There we got that. Now we can start rearranging and deciding exactly how is it that we wanted this to be? Do I want a ribbon at the top? You know what that means? That means I could do maybe a third of the green ribbon. If I don't have enough here filling everything in. We've got that like the blue being in the center. That does give us maybe enough space for another ribbon, filling it. What do you think? I'm digging that. We've got that in the center, and we've got this piece coming up to it, and we've got this piece. That's going to be here. When I zigzag stitch all these on, then will be good. Then got this piece here and I'm almost feeling like green stripe at the bottom. We'll have a little green stripe as our thing that's pulling this together. I'm like in that. Then this is going to be say, our spine in the middle of the book. I like that. Then still thinking, this button here. What do you think? I'm filling it? That's filling pretty good right there. I'm thinking that's going to be the cover of our journal. Now what I'm going to do is get some stick pins, and I'm going to pin this into place, and I'm going to put some thread in my sewing machine, and I'm going to zigzag stitch all these pieces together. Actually What I might do because I want another layer of this linen there to really give it some extra strength to be on the inside. But I'm almost thinking that I could do that last all the way around and that'll hide all this stitching inside the two pieces of the fabric. Yes, I think that's what I'm going to do. I'll cut another piece of linen and we'll do that lat and then we'll be ready to sew our signatures in. Is feeling good. Now, I've put a button on here. We've put a button on here for a reason. Now we have to decide what kind of wrap around that we want. What do we want wrapping around this also? We've got to decide that before I'm done because I'm going to want to sew the wrap around onto the other side in between the two layers. I've got more ribbon. Let's make that decision before I take everything apart. Let's see what all we got here. We've got more ribbon. It's a big enough journal that it needs to be a big enough ribbon. I've got another green color here that's a different color green, but that's almost too much the same. I like that orange. Let's see. I like yellow. I've put the yellow. Where did I put the yellow? I've got a yellow one because I used it because I used the yellow on this pretty one here. I don't know. Now that I'm looking at it, that's almost too much. We could have just a little one that loops over and ties. I'm glad we're thinking through this before we get much further. I could have a little piece of ribbon that comes around and either just ties around it or a loop that you can then close like a button fastener. I've got some cord. Oh, I'm thinking cord. It's a pretty yellow cord, so I still get the yellow that I was maybe want a little bit of, but not too much of. Feeling good. Feeling good about this. Let me go ahead and my sole machine over here and I'm going to pin these pieces on here and then we'll stitch them together, so I'll be right back. I went ahead and got some pins, a little pin cushion here, and then I remembered that I left myself extra space. Before I pin all my stripes down, I needed to actually cut my length of fabric closer to the size that it's actually going to be for the height. I still have time to trim the width after I get everything of Attached down and then give myself some room to sew, I can cut the extra off of the width, but I need to go ahead and cut the height. I cut off the little bit of extra that I left and then I realize that my stripes are not even, and I want this to be in the center so that it covers the same amount of spine once we get those in. Now I need to actually figure how much of this? I want this blue stripe here to be in the center. I need to re up everything here to just get that closer to the center. The height of this is about 13 ". 6.5 ". We put the center about right here. I know that I need that blue to come up to about right there. That's where I want the blue to sit. Now I just need to get everything else lined up with that and still use all the colors that I've picked. And feeling like that. Then I had I think I'm going to cover up the blue edge there. And then I had one of these. Then I had this other piece of fabric, and then I had a green. Now we're more lined up with where the height is actually going to be. Otherwise, if I waited to center that up correctly. I would have lost half of my striping that off the bottom. Last. I didn't want to do that because I want this blue to be in the middle. Just some problem solving before. I get it all stuck down and now I'm just going to go ahead and tack a needle down on these to keep them where I want them. When I pull out my sewing machine, I can just stripe it real easy with some zig zag stitches without too much going into it. I've pinned one side where I think I want everything to be. I'm going to go ahead and pin this side. I'm going to sew all the strikes with a zig zag stitch, just run along with a zig zag, and then I'm going to zigzag stitch that right in the middle of this. I'm going to mark the middle. I don't forget where that's at. I'll zigzag stitch that down and then we'll be ready to put the the second piece that I'm going to use, which will cover all that stitching. Let me go ahead and finish taping these down. I'm just going to zigzag stripes. I'm going to zig zag these stripes with a color of thread that hopefully is complimentary to what I'm doing. But you could use white or black, but I'm wanting to use something in the family that I'm using. I'm going to see what I've got, and I'll be back. Try to do this where you can see it. My sewing machine is so old, I've managed to lose the plate that goes here while it was living in the closet. I don't even know how I did that. So we'll just hope that it lets me sew with that plate missing. I think I'm going to start could start by sewing these down. And I've got it. Ow. Got it lined up there with the edge. Just poked myself with a needle. But I'm going to make sure I'm on the edge over here. And I've got the pedal down below. I'm using a zig zag stitch and I can adjust the size, but I've got it set it whatever number three is and number one over here on this thing. I'm just going to try to keep it going. I might have been easier if I'd cut all this ribbons on this side to the size of that actual piece there. And I picked a green thread because we're working with the blues and the greens. I'm not looking for perfection at this point because if you'll recall, I left myself extra room on the length and I may be cutting off this side when we're done. We'll just see. Now I'm just going to run down the lines and try to get at least the set. I'm not so in the other end yet I'm going to let the one end be my guide and just keep hopefully lined up, so we'll see. I got off a little in the center, but it's in the center. I don't mind. I did get off a little bit there in the center. I might come back down in the part that I got off and run a zigzag on that fabric because if I don't, that's going to f for the rest of its life. Let's see. Here's the center. Far. I've got a tiny bit of edge right here that I might want to do, so I'm just going to go and tack it down. All right. It's not perfect. I'm going to leave the top edge, not sewn down because I'm going to sew another piece of fabric to this. But before I do that, I'm going to get the final size that I need and trim it down based on the thicknesses of my signatures. Then I'm going to just sew the front piece to another piece exactly like this. That we can't see all that. But I do need to cut the edges and then redetermine what the center is so I can sew this on before I zig zag stitch the back onto the front. Let me do that real quick and I'll be back. I've set the sewing machine on the floor. We're not looking for perfect here because I have sewn hardly any in the past 20 years and still and I have a very, very old sewing machine, and you could glue all this down, if you'd rather, you could probably do it with a glue gun, maybe some fabric glue, I'd test the glue on the fabric before I did that, to make sure that just to make sure that I'm thinking at the same time that I'm looking. Anyway, I would test the fabric before I did that just to make sure that it didn't soak through and look weird on the fabric. You could use a glue stick, that probably would work the best. This is about where it's going to be. That's about even so I can see what the spine is going to look like. I have enough fabric here that I could add another signature, but I'm not going to. I go. I'm going to go ahead and trim this side here. And I'm looking at about a quarter of an inch. I'm going to have the same overhead in the front and the back that I have right there, and it's about a quarter of an inch. And I'm going to grab my rotary cutter. I've actually grabbed a rotary cutter and quilting fabric thing because it's going to make it easier for me to see and judge this correctly or more correctly. If I'm right here, and I can set this right here just to really get it in the right place. I really want that right there, and I want it to be straight. I'm on a cutting mat underneath this, I'm good with that. And that was several layers of fabric, but man, look how easy that makes that to cut that. I got a little overhang there. See I was cutting off that end anyway. Now I've got this right here. I want to make sure I've got my quarter of an inch. That's where I want it. I'm going to flip this over so that I can see how much space I've really got there on this side. Make sure it's exactly where I want it. Make sure I've got my overhang still, and now I can give myself a little overhang here on the front and cut that. A little bigger than my mat, but that's okay. Just makes it easy to get it straight and get the whole thing sized up correctly. And then let's test it out. Did I get it where I needed it? I've got all four of my signatures that go in. Tiny overhang on the top, little tiny overhang on the bottom, so that's perfect. I'm going to mark the center by just folding it in half and giving myself a center. Then that will give me a point to reference with my piece that I'm going to run along the spine. All right, so let's just see what we got here. So I still want this stitching to be on the inside. I'm going to put my spine about right here and just to give you an idea of what my thinking is before we stitch it down for good, that's what I'm thinking. Then we have a button closure over here. That's interesting. Then you can decide after you look at it, do you like it? I don't know if I like that. I'm glad we did that, Let me grab the green one and see if I like that better. Here's the green one. Yeah, I do like the green one better. Look at that. Let's just look at that. You might not like it at all, but I'm feeling that. What do you think of the green instead? I think that's pretty cool. Does give me no reason to have that blue there and the blue gave me the reason to have that there. It's okay. Or we can just leave it without you could stop at that point, so the front onto the back and sew those on there. I just wanted to be a little fancier than that. I think I'm going to be a little fancier than that and do it anyway. Well, in the center. Let's get that centered as we can. I want it to not be all over the place. I'm just going to pin this in place. Then I'm just going to zigzag stitch these two on here on each side. Then I'll be ready to get my next piece of linen. And sew it on the bottom. Hang on. I didn't leave myself enough space here. It's going to fray, so I'm okay with that. I'm only going to do with these lines because I've got all the way around that I'm going to do in a minute. I'm not looking to down the top yet. Okay. Now I got the back on, and now I'm going to cut a second piece of linen real quick. I'll be right back and it's going to be this exact size, and I'll be right back. Okay. I've got another piece of linen cut and you want whatever the nice side is to be outside. If you see a side, you like better than the other. Then I've got the piece that we've sewn And I want all this to be on the inside. I don't want to see it. I'm going to sew this piece of linen right on it like this. Then we can do a little final trim up of everything to make sure everything's perfect on our journal, but we could actually do it at the end. Let's see. I'm trying to just make sure I get it all in the right place here. All right, I'm just going to run around all four edges, keeping it as straight as I can here. I'm giving it a little bit of a lip here. I'm going to need to do a little bit of trimming and I'm giving myself a little space to be able to do that. I hope. We'll just do the best we can. I've taken that off the sewing machine. I know it's not perfect because I actually had extra linen over here. That's okay though because I have left myself plenty of space to come back and trim. I already know I need to trim this part right here, so I'm going to go ahead and trim that out of my way. I might trim some more, but I didn't have it perfectly straight apparently. I'm go a and trim the extra off this side. Then I can see how much space I got. I've still got plenty of space to trim this on the edge here. I'm going to do that. I'm just going to do that with my scissors, and I'm just going to trim really like an eighth of an inch. I'm just making the eve eve and you're going to get off any scraggs. So if you're doing it with scissors, that's how easy it is just to trim it. I'm just trimming along my edges for any weird stray, not straight extra pieces. Like I said, I'm not going for perfect when I'm doing stuff. I'm going for interesting and pretty when I'm done, but it doesn't have to be perfect. Don't get hung up on perfectly straight lines or everything being exact. Let's test here because I got some extra space. Oh, good. I still got room. And then you'll never know that my piece of linen wasn't perfectly straight. Leave yourself some space. Then this edge, I'm leaving raw, and then with any luck, it will fray and be interesting and pretty as the journal ages. Oh my gosh, that was a lot of fabric to cut through. There we go. You could even fray it some now if you wanted to pick at the threads and pull some of that out. You could start the fray There we go. Now, we've got the right size. We need to decide, the buttons going on here. I want to go ahead and put the button on there. I'm just going to take a needle and thread and sew that button on there just coming through the holes, it's in the spot that I want it. And I can even check the spot with the signatures right here. Se there. I like it with the spine. You might have thought it looked better without the spine, but that's the choice you can make on yours. I'll put the button there. Let me go get a needle and thread. D 7. Sewn Cover - Assembling Book: All right. We are now ready to sew our signatures into our cover. I've got my bone folder just to make sure everything is as flat as I want it to be. I've got my all, which is going to poke my holes in my book for me, but I don't need to poke holes in the fabric because my needle should go through the fabric itself. I've got my waxed thread, and I'm going to go ahead and be using this thread that came in the little Amazon kit along with my my needles because this little Amazon bookbinding kit is perfect and it's cheap and it had this color thread in it, which matches my button, and it's going to match the little cording that I decided to use on the other side. I saved a piece of this stuff that I cut out because I'm going to use it I think in a minute. Basically, what we are going to do is find the middle of our journal and fold that where I can see it. Be I've got four of these, I might even mark it with a pencil just to make it a little more clear to myself where that was. Because I've got four of these, there's not one that's going to sit in the middle per se. But I'm just lightly giving myself a visual with a pencil where that middle is because two of these are going to go on one side of the middle and two of these are going to go on the other side of the middle, and then it should be centered when we are finished. What I'm going to do is go ahead and just make sure these are in the order that I want them in. Because I've got different papers in each one. I've got a blue paper in the first one and the last one because remember I used handmade papers, and I can see that upside down because I like the paper, looking like the tree is supposed to go where it's supposed to go. Before you sew these, if you've got any papers with a directional thing on it like that had that tree. You need to go ahead and decide before you start which way is up and which way is down. I apparently had all of these upside down, we'll say. There we go now the tree is going the right direction. Just going to give it one last little firmness there. I'm going to put these in the order that I want them. There's a tree and I had this blue paper, too, but I think I want the tree in the first and the last. And then just making sure all of these are as squished as I can get them. And then I'm going to number the m so that I'm keeping them in order, and then I can just erase that number later, but that will also help me keep going in the right direction because I tend to turn all over the place when I'm making stuff. Now, what I'm going to do is just mark where I'm going to put the holes because we're going to do a very easy stitching with this. I'm going to put the hole in the middle, and then I'm going to put the hole at about 2 " in from the end on both of those. I could go a little further if I wanted, but I think that I'll be fine. I'm going to take my ruler. This is why you want to keep them all in the same order because I'm just going to take I've got a tiny that's got a flat end. I'm just going to mark all four of these in the place. Now that I've got that marked. Now I can just run up the spines and give myself a mark. Now I want to keep them all in the same order or they will not line up when you sew them even though I measured it, trust me, they just won't. Now I'm going to take my all and I'm going to punch some holes. Basically, what I'm going to do is flip it to the inside and then find each hole and I'm going in at an angle, and that will get me to the other side right in the center. See how I did that. I'm going to do that for all three holes at an angle, there we go right in the center, and I'm going to do the third one. And then there we go. Perfect. Just make sure I got a big enough hole. I'm just going to go all the way through again. And then I'm just going to fold these right side out, and I'm going to do the next one. So I'm going to do all of those real quick. That one I got off to the side, so I'm going to try that one again. I'm not worried about it making an extra hole if it does because I can fix that with paint and stuff later. If you're not directly in the center and you get a little tiny bit off, you're okay. Sometimes I'm a little more than a tiny bit off, but it still comes together for me. I just don't worry about it. I'm just making sure I've got a big enough hole in there. Okay. And once I've got them all cut, I'm going to put them all back in order. And I'm going to start with the second one. I'm just going to thread my needle here. And this stuff is thick, so I'm not going to double it. You can double it if you want though. I'm going to set these to the side and I've got number one and two, and I think I'm going to do number two first because then I can be right there on the edge of this. I want them to be as close as I can to the center. I'm thinking right there and I'm doing it with the number two first because two and three are going to be in the center of our book, and just make sure that I'm actually where I want to be at the top and the bottom. I Then once I've got it where I want it, I'm going to go through the center hole and come out the cover. I'm actually going to push all the way through to the cover. Let me make sure I'm all the way through the papers, and then I want to go all the way through the cover, and I want to make sure it's I want it. I think it's where I want it through the papers and then just to the left of center. Then I've actually just pushed it all the way through to the outside. What you want to do is then come to the top and now we're judging where the hole is. I'm trying to find the hole. I could poke it all the way through if I needed to find the hole. I could actually get like a pin, show me where the hole is, or the other sewing needle. Let me grab the other sewing needle. I just want something visually to show me where I'm poking my other needle through. Let me just get these lined up. Okay, all the holes are lined up. And again, I'm just I'm trying to be the same distance but to the left of the center line. So we'll say right there. Yeah, is that right? Is that where I want to be? That's where I want to poke in the next needle. Now I'm going to come in right where that needle is. I'm just going to pull one out and follow it in with the other. Easier said than done, but that's what I'm trying to do. So that I find the right spot. Then I can poke that through the holes. There we go. Just takes a little bit of pengln, but it's not hard. What I'm doing is I'm pulling it through and I'm pulling this one as we're going, but I'm leaving a tail on this one. Because we're going to tie this off. Now we can go through the center hole, same hole that we've already been through and I'm going to go back through the hole here going to the outside. All right. Now, pull that all the way. Now we need to come in the third hole. I'm again going to guide myself where that third hole is. There we go. Then I want this pole tight so that's where it's supposed to be as I'm coming through with the third hole. And st to the, just slightly to the left of the center that I gave myself. Now I'm just going to direct my other needle right in where that needle is coming out. Look at that. We did it. Then I'm just going to pull everything nice and taut and from the outside, it should look like that. When we're all done, we're going to do that for each one of these signatures. When we're all done, we'll have of the tha lines on the outside. This thread is nice and sturdy and thick. I'm not worried about it being one thickness, but you could double thickness if you needed to. I just pulled that thread through the other loop that we had out there and that's going to give that's going to give me a spot to tie these now without worrying about it coming loose. Then I'm just going to double knot that. Now it's your choice, whether you cut these off or you keep them. Um, you can just cut them short if you wanted to, those are just going to live inside your journal there. You could tie charms on the end of those if you like that charm look. Now you can see it's attached to the cover and we are good to go. Now, I'm going to go and do number one because we just sewed in number two. And I might need a longer thread since I just trim that off as short as I did. That's okay. I'm going to trim them all. I'm again going to go through the cover. I'm going to try to line right up with what we just did, but over like an eighth of an inch, I want to give it enough room to be in there, but still be right beside that. I want them side by side as close as I can get them because that'll give me a nice tight fit. You don't want them on top of each other you can't do it right neck. You still got to have a gap in there, but doesn't have to be a big big gap. I'm thinking like right there, which is about a quarter of an inch. Go right over from the hole that's there, go about right there and I'm going to go all the way through the cover. I'm going to leave myself a little straggler here, and then I'm going to go ahead with the other needle. Again, just help direct myself into the right spot. I'm trying to stay the same distance up here that I just created down there. I've given myself about a quarter of an inch. Let's see. That would be exactly a quarter of an inch. If I wanted to measure that out, see that would be the exact right there, which is basically what, one, two, three, four, 4 millimeters. Is that how many is in there? One, two, three, four. I have to get my magnifying glass out, but it's about a quarter of an inch. Now I'm going to go back where I was. And give myself a hole to come back through. I pulled my thread out. There we go. All right. Going to guide myself back into the hole that I just created so that I can be in the right spot here. There we go right into the book. Good deal. There we go. All right. Now I'm going to go back through the middle hole that I created there. And I'm going to go back through that hole on the outside of the cover. Now, I'm going to pull that down and come back in the third hole. Let's find the third hole. About a quarter of an inch over, just trying to keep the lined up there and making sure I'm beside the hole there on the other ones that we just already sewed in. I want them all to be about the same. There we go, coming back in. Here we go. Got it again. All right. Just pull everything taught. Don't pull it so hard that that it's tear in anything, but just pull it taught, and then I just loop it through here twice to really give myself a moment to get the needle off and then double not it. There we go. Now we've got two of our signatures in there, and we've created our spine or we've started the creation of our spine and now I've got number three that we're going to line up on this side of the line. Where did I just throw our other needle down? I see this needle. Here we go. I'm trying not to lose things right in front of myself. I'm just going to get this started with a new piece of thread. Can't believe we're almost done. I love how I can make a whole gorgeous art journal that's going to last me basically my whole life. After we painted, it's going to be something I love. I'm actually going to flip this around so that I can work this way. But I've numbered all the books. I know that I'm in the right direction because I've got the number three down there at the bottom and the number two and the number one, but I find it easier to work towards this direction. We're going in the center again just like we did with the other ones. There we go. I know that I want to give myself a quarter of an inch. I'm going to line up right with that threadhle and give myself about a quarter of an inch. Here we go. I'm going to go on through. You can see I'm lined up steel with the other two. Leave my tail here. Then I'm going to go ahead and take my little guide needle and guide myself into the right spot. I could probably do a quarter of an inch over on the spine looking for it, but it's almost easier just to go ahead and do this way. You do whatever way works for you. Go right about there. Judging where that center line is versus where I'm going in. I've still got enough room on that side though. I'm still feeling pretty good about that. There's my guide needle that I just pull all the way through, but that's okay. It's stilled in the right spot. All right. Let's just take up that spot with the new needle. There we go. And right into our hole there. F. Back through the center. I need a thimble. I have a thimble here. Very helpful if you especially pushing through all the different layers, the thimble is super handy. If you need a thimble because you're hurting your fingers as you try to pull and push your needle, you might have that on hand. Get one of those while you're at the. Let guide our to the hole here. Come off on my little all hole. Let's just go ahead and make that. There we go. Again, I just don't worry about if I've got a spot like that I've created because I can paint that or I can collage over that, or I can I can fix it. It's not a big deal, I don't get stuck on that. Here I've gone through the center of my thread when I went back through that. If you go through the center of your thread, it's going to get stuck just like this. You want to avoid going through the center of that thread when you're going back through that hole. If you do that, you need to pull this out. I know that sucks right there with you. Then you need to out. Which one was that? There we go. We're going to pull that back through, and then we're going to pull it back through here. Then we're going to pull it back through here. We don't want to be stuck in the center of that piece of thread. It stops us from pulling it tight, and I'm glad I could show you that so I could tell you what to do when you do that because you're going to do that. Just do the best you can, but pull it back out if you go right through the middle of that thread like that. It's obvious that I did that when I did it because everything got stuck. A. Let me find the exact hole that we were in again. We were right here, so I want to come back in the same spot. I don't want to get off of where I was. There we go. And find our way back into our signature. Now this time, it ought to work. Let's see. There we go. Now we can pull everything tight. I can check the outside. It's tight. I don't have any weird things that won't pull tight. I'm just going to loop through our loop here two times to just give me a moment two. Then cut that loose and tie me a double knot without it moving around. Holds it tight for me. If you just do it once, it still moves around. All right. We're almost there. Number four. I think these are upside down. Let me just double check. I put number four in the same way. Number three, right down there on that end. I need to make sure that number four is right down there on that end, even though I'm sewing this away. And just to check that we can still shut our book. I love it it's coming together. All right. I got one last thread here, but I don't know that I left it long enough. So let's grab one more piece of thread. Again, this is already waxed thread. If you use some other type of thread, it's good if you can wax it. You can use a little stick of bees wax to do that. I have the bees wax. Here we go. If you're using a linen thread or something like that, and it's not waxed, run that thread over the wax it over the wax and hold your finger over and pull it so that you're waxing the thread. That gives the thread ale extra strength. It puts all the fibers in their place, and then it I go off where that needs to be. Let me just there we go. It also helps not to tear your paper as you're doing stuff. I'm right here, I'm coming over about a quarter of an inch or so right next to where the last hole was. I'm keeping them all as lined up as I can. When you're sewing something like this, you're just doing the best you can. I want to have a little tail left over, so don't pull that all the way out. Then let's go find the top hole. Surprise myself. Again, I'm going to come over from that top piece there over about a quarter of an inch. You could make yourself a template if you feel like you can't judge the sizing correctly. A little paper template is very helpful with the holes on it. That might be that you would consider. Just throw an idea out there at you. We're coming and then I felt like that wasn't quite where I wanted to be. I think I want to be like, right there. Is that where I want to be? Just looking at that compared. Nope, I think that was right. Okay. Yeah. All right. Just going to guide myself through the whole. There we go. Oh, my gosh. All right. And then back through the middle hole here. And then out here. All right, I've come through my thread, so I'm going to go ahead and come out of that. I've just looped part of the thread there. So we'll come out of that before I get any further. If you try to move that piece of thread out of your way that sometimes still catches. If it catches, catch it, catch it early. Catch it early. We don't want to be worried about that back through that hole and come on down to the bottom. We're getting there. Last one. All right. Get my little guide needle here, which I could just come on in a quarter of an inch from here. I mean, you don't really need to do that. I could just come right through there and put that a quarter of an inch over. Is that where I want it? Is that where I want it. All right. All right. There we go. And just pull it tau. Oh, my gosh. Look how good that looks. See, take a minute, but we get there. I'm just going to it while I've got it and that will give me a moment to separate the needle and ties into a double knot. Okay. I'm actually going to cut all mine to about that length. I don't mind having a fun little thread in there, but I don't mind hanging out the bottom. Some people love it. Your choice. You can cut them real short, doesn't matter, but they're going to be in there. Now, I flip it correctly. Now I've got one down here where it should be. I'm wanting to make sure that these all line up the way I wanted. It's going to flow in e though. It's not going to be perfect. It's sown here, and then now we can use each section, and then we'll have a gap. T is what it is. That's the way the sone to fabric binding is done. But I like it because now it lays flat, I can work on double layouts, when I get to this edge, I might treat each one as a separate thing or I treat the whole thing and we just work it as we go. And so now we've got four sections. Everything's trimmed up, though I like the way it's trimmed. The only thing left is, I am going to attach on the inside. I'm going to do this with tacky glue, so I have my lens acid free tacky glue here. What I'm going to do is tacky glue this ribbon and then a decorative patch on top of it because that's what I want to do. I could have been even more careful sewing the spine and sewed this into that so that it was coming out of that. But because I didn't do that, I'm showing you another option that you could do. If I could get this piece of plastic off of here. Come on, plastic. I know this is probably the best way to do the ribbon for them. But for me, it's not working. Oh, my goodness. What I want this to be able to do is to come up and wrap around. I'm going to leave a little tail. And then you can unwrap it. The other thing that you could do is a loop and then attach the loop down here, that the problem with the loop is if I put too much stuff in there, it's going to get fat and the loop might eventually be too small. I almost like it better that maybe we could loop it around to close it off. Feeling like. Let me just give myself enough ribbon to think here. Think about this, how I actually want to do it because I was thinking. Let's see, want that about right there in the middle of the blue, which is right here. I was thinking that I'd put that there, and then I could actually glue, I could glue this on the inside, and this could be like a pencil holder or an extra pocket. Oh my gosh. Really, I I do it this way, we have the overflows and Oh my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Then we would have this come out and we'd be able to loop it shut and you can loop it as many times as you need. What do you think of that? Ha. I'm filling that. Now I wish this was sown, but I think I'm going to glue it. To show that you could glue some of this stuff and it'll be fine. Am I right there in the middle I want to be in the middle. We're going to go ahead and attach this here, and you'll just have to let that dry. Then let's see. I love it. I love it. I'm actually going to attach a little more here in the middle. And then I'm going to attach each end, I'm going to allow these open so that I could, if I wanted to, have a little free flow area. Tissue, to get that clue off there. The old card I used to smear stuff around. But if I leave these open, I can attach pins in there. If I have a pin or something that, for whatever reason that I wanted to carry around with me, I could have a place to put that. But you could sew all these, but I'm just showing you another doable way. Let's go with the same There we go. Look at that. Oh, my gosh. I love it. Now we do not want to pull that while that's doing that. You may have to go back and tack that with thread anyway, but I think that will be fine once it sets up because this glue was crazy, good. The lens tacky glue that I use with the regular bookbinding. Then we are done. We could at this point to embellish these any further. I actually had one more piece out here. I had these random appliques. I think you iron them on that I've had for years, and I don't think I paid that price. This says $5. I don't think I paid that years ago, but I'm almost thinking I could glue it on. What about right there? I'm thinking that could be a pretty extra little decoration, I could go a little higher. I also had these little dragon flies. Look at that. That's fun. I don't know how cute you want your journal to be, but just throwing another little idea out there for you. But I do like the flower. I could even put the dragon fly somewhere else if I wanted it. Then you could be like this a garden journal or something like that I'd be fun. Mine is going to be an abstract art journal. But I thought I would show you another idea that was fun. I'd be fun too just to loop it around the button. I really if that were the top of the button, that'd be fun, but then we couldn't loop stuff around. But we could take that off and that could be the top of the button, then you wouldn't even know that was a button. Oh. Oh, my gosh. I'm feeling that. That's what I want. I'm going to cut this off. It was a flower, no more. Wha. Now it's going to be the top of my button. I hope it sticks down in there. Let's just see. I don't know. Will this stick down in there? We're going to do it. I don't want to get too far down into those button holes and stop that from doing what it needs to do, but look at that. Oh my gosh. How does that look, Let me see. Right there. Okay. That's what mine is going to be doing. I could put a dragon fly over there if I wanted. But I don't think I'm feeling that, but I'm feeling that a little jo on top of the button, even though I used a super cool button. Dan, I used a super cool button. Now we are done. We just have to let our little cord dry, and then we'll be able to use our cord as a closure. I could have done the cord long enough to wrap around it, but I didn't really want to do that. That's our closure. We'll be able to wrap that around the button and. What do you think about our fabric colored beautiful fabric covered? Journal with different yummy papers. I can't wait to see what you with this technique. You can glue the if you want to do a hard cover and cover the hard cover with the fabric, you could do that. Lots of different choices. I just think it's beautiful and another option for your journals. I'll see you back in class. 8. No Sew Hard Cover Journal - Supplies: Take a look at the supplies that we'll be using in class. I have decided to make this journal with the watercolor paper because I'm making journals for myself that I can now use for years to come. And so I am using papers that I like to use. Your paper of choice for the inside. We're going to make signatures just like we do with the other books, and you can pick vintage paper, you can pick papers that you've already painted, you can do jelly plate prints. If you like to jelly plate, that's a good way to do stuff. You can do any watercolor paper or mixed media paper or whatever you're making your sketch book for, your art journal four, whatever paper you love, use that paper. I have been using the Cty paper, which is 100% cotton watercolor paper in the largest size that I usually see these four like in a package. This is the 12 by sixteens size paper. It's a little bigger than that, but that's about the size. It's A three. I like this because it makes the big journals in a good size. It's not the little ones. This is a good size for me to then paint in and collag in and do whatever I want to do, it's a great size and when you open it, it's a big double spread, so I just love it. That is the paper I'm choosing to use. It's weird paper. It's not like a regular watercolor paper. Just know that this paper is strange, but I like to paint mixed media on it, and I've decided cost wise. You can get 20 sheets for about $34. If you compare that to say the Homul or the arches or the bigger pieces of paper. This is a little cheaper to make a whole art journal with. For the different things I like to do, I've decided I do like this paper enough to make journals to work in and not make the price so expensive that I don't feel like I can use it. I don't want it to be the nicest paper I have and then may be afraid to use it. I feel like by using a paper that I like that's not super expensive, I feel like now I won't be afraid of it. What I have chosen to use, you can substitute and pick whatever you want. I also am using bookboard, because we're doing a no so fabric covered journal. We're going to be gluing the stuff. I wanted a hard front and back cover. I'm using bookboard. If you don't have bookboard, or you don't want to wait to order it if you have all the other stuff. If you have watercolor pads of paper, An brand. The back cover of these. Here's one that's open. Mule. The back cover of these is a little thicker than the chipboard bookboard that I'm using. Fantastic for books. Go steal the back cover of your watercolor paper pads. It's perfect for that, and it's almost even just a smidge thicker than the bookboard. I'm using chipboard sheets. These, I think are 11 by 17. Which they're just short enough that for this book, I have to use two of these. But then I end up with all these lovely scraps that I can then use for other stuff later. So I do keep those scraps. Then for this book, These are easy to do. It just takes a little bit of prep work, but they're so easy. For this book, I have used a vintage fabric that I had for steel life photography, and it's antique fabric that came from France. I ordered it from a lady that lives in France that offered it up for sale at one time and it wasn't a lot. It was about a third of a yard by the width of that fabric. It's like an holstery fabric. It's perfect for this. If you can go to an phosry fabric store that sells upholstery fabrics, those are perfect for journals. I just had enough to do one book and have some scraps leftover that I could then use for other stuff. I'm going to save all that. I picked a fabric that I wanted. You could also do a aj paja fabric on here, but I feel since we're not sewing it. It's almost easier for it to be a lovely big piece. Then I was very strategic and what I wanted to be on the front. Look how beautiful that is. I sacrificed a little bit of the fabric to get it in the exact right spot of where I wanted it, but it's gorgeous. Then on the back, I've got the little birds and I see that I've covered a bird head, but that's okay. I still think it's beautiful. I can't believe I covered a bird head. Then you'll notice that I have decided to get fancy, and I've got a little velvet on the spine and then I've got this yummy velvet Visually creating the look that it's holding the cover on, even though it's really not, it's all glued together rather nicely. I picked a couple ribbons to do that. I've got about an inch and a half ribbon here, velvet ribbons, about an inch and a half. Then the spine is using a 2.5 inch ribbon, which everything is glued and placed where it's pretty when you look at it, but it'll stay nice and attached when we go to use it. It's going to be very sturdy to use that. Then on the inside, I've used the signatures and a couple pieces of art that are already painted. If you've got some pieces you've already painted that you want to slip in, that would be fantastic, or if you want to paint all your pages first and then make your signatures and attach everything and have a finished book right off the bat. You could do that too if you're afraid to work in a book and you find it easier work on paper. Paint everything first and then assemble the book. You don't have to stress too hard about that. I have enough ribbon that I've made these little spine pieces and wrap around piece so that as I'm working, I could close it up and I've left myself enough ribbon that it can get fatter or I can cut that shorter later. That's what I'm doing there on the cover with the ribbon. You also need a glue. This one I ended up like in the tacky glue better than the PVA glue, but I do have some PVA glue. That I was using on the bigger pieces, but I also used glue stick. I have a tacky glue acid free, I make sure everything's acid free, and then maybe have a good sized glue stick, makes it really easy to do large areas pretty fast. Then I also have my little book binding kit, which basically consists of a bone folder, and all so that you can poke your holes for those signatures, a really heavy duty, large needle, embroidery needle. And then waxed thread. All of these pieces came in a kit together. I have them separate, but I like this kit the best because I have an all, but my all looks like an egg with a shorter needle on it, and I like this one better. I actually love this $7 kit off Amazon the best. I will link that for you in the supplies. That's basically everything that I've used to put this book together. Then what we're going to do is still tacky. Everything is set up, but it's not dry dry. I want the book cover to be flat when you're doing this big thing and you do glue on the cover warps a tiny bit. I'm just going to set this under a pile of books overnight and then tomorrow, this will be ready to go. All the glue will be dry and it will be the most amazing art journal to then use. This is another thing that I like about the ti papers.'s hand torn edges, and I love the look of the hand torn edges. I think it's going to be really fun to work in the best thing I just thought of. I did use I did a little cheat in class and you'll see it when we get to it, but I used a little bit of two inch self adhesive book repair tape to cheat the spine a little bit after I glued it to attach it a little bit better so that I could then move along with my book and have it done in one day, basically, rather than letting things dry for a long time. This was my little cheat. I do have some two inch self. He's a book repair tape, which you don't have to have, but I have really appreciated having that, making these bigger journals and being able to keep on moving. I just thought I would throw that in there because I saw it sitting to the side and I forget to mention it. See back in class. 9. No Sew Hard Cover Journal - Getting Started: This project, we are going to make a fabric covered hard cover. No se art journal, so that you can still use some of your favorite fabrics and ribbons, but maybe you're a little intimidated by sewing the cover for your first one. Or you don't sew. This would be another fun option. I'm so obsessed with this lovely fabric, this antique fabric that I have now held onto this for years because I used it in steel life photography stuff, which I can still do now. I mean, I I could actually use this book as a photography prop, but it's so beautiful and I've always loved it. I think I'm going to use this fabric as a cover for the book that I create. Then if I have any leftover scraps, I will just save every little scrap that I have and that can be some scrap for another book or something else that I want to make because I'm going to have some leftover. I'm going to have enough that I could maybe do another small book with it or some other stuff with it. This is about, I'd say, It's like a third of a yard, maybe half a yard times whatever width it is. It's an old upholstery fabric or curtain fabric. It's nice and thick and it feels like a linen. If you've got an upholstery fabric store anywhere near you, which let me tell you now I'm dying to search out upholstery stores here in my town and go visit because I feel like I need some more scraps for some more things to work with. I'm going to use this fabric as a cover and I have pulled some other things to think about with it. I like this pink ribbon, so that's a consideration because there's pink in here. I actually really love this red ribbon even though it's super red. But what if that were say a little sliver on the spine and not the whole thing? It's not like it would be a whole lot in there, but it's like a wil color. I also like gold because there's some gold in there. I wish I had this in the wider size because that would definitely be a gorgeous color on the spine. I also have this lovely rust color. I get this off of here. I found all of these at the hobby lobby, but now I want to visit. I've loved these velvet ribbons so much. That they're my favorite to work on with these books, and these are an inch and a half. They're about an inch and a half, which is about 3 centimeters in size. That's like the perfect size for wrapping around the book and being the closure of the book. But I like this rust color, so that could be something I wrap around the book possibly. I don't know that I'm going to use all of these. I'm just gathering inspiration and just throwing some ideas out there. I also liked this green burlap ribbon because that looked pretty on there too. Lots of options that I've pulled over here out of my different sashes to see what we could create. This one, I'm still going to use that ti paper in that very large size. This is that 12 by 16. It's a nice size, 12 by 16, so we end up with an eight by 12 Is it eight by 12 that we end up with? I think it is. You see, we end up with eight by 12 size book, which is a really great size. It's not too big, and it's not like the little bitty books because I'm obsessed with the larger ones that I can paint a larger spread. If you always are thinking, Oh, what am I going to do with all these pieces that I'm painting or something like that? Well, if you're painting them in the book, they're not loose sheets of paper that are laying all over the place and now it's created something amazing when you're done, and you have a reason to then show up and paint all the time because now you're filling a book. I'm going to use the cody paper. It is a cotton paper. Like it because it's good for various mediums. It's a nice heavy paper, and it's not expensive. You could certainly be using any paper that you've got. If you like the arches paper and you want your book to be arches paper, and maybe you have the big sheets, you can tear those sheets into this size and then fold it and have this size sketchbook, or you can fold it into smaller ones, or you can fold it and make bigger ones. Don't limit yourself in what choices that you have. Now, this one, I have decided for it to be a watercolor book. I don't have the mixed media papers in here. But I do have this painting that I already did and I don't want to necessarily use it for anything. I had it just in my bin of it was a fun thing to do and experiment for the day because a lot of times I do color challenges or whatever I'm inspired to paint for that day and I just show up and I paint. It's not really meant for anything. I thought, Look at this. Wouldn't that be pretty because I want the first page of my signatures to be the inside of the bookcver? Won't that be pretty if you opened, you know, the book onto that first page. Now my page that I'm gluing down to the book cover is a finished piece. I thought that was fun. Not everybody makes a book that way. You can learn how to make a book and then make it your own and make stuff the way you want to make it. A lot of people leave these intact and glue a different book cover down. It's your choice. The goal is to make something where everything's attached, it has a cover and it's not going to fall apart, and there's 1 million ways to do that. Some of this, I'm just make it up for myself and like, here's how I like to make the book, so let's go for it. That's what I like to do. We're going to use this paper. I'm going to use the full size because I like it. You can make smaller journals. You don't have to make the big journals, but I'm going to make this size. I've done four signatures, and all I've done is this was the piece of paper that I started with. I took five sheets, and I folded them in half, and then I took my bone folder and just really tightened that down. You'll just take your folder, whatever folder that you've got on your surface, you'll just flatten those down so they are good and set. It's good if you stand up and you can put all your weight on that. I just tighten those down like that with a bone folder, and then they are ready for me to sew together. I'm going to make this one where I sew it together. Do a little glue here on the binding, and then we're going to attach the cover to that. I'm debating on that if I want the spine to be separate from this to begin with and then the cover, and then an overlay on the spine. I'll show you what I mean, but that's what I've dreamed up for today. Those are my four sections of already just flattened them into that. Also pulled some lace that's just a pack of old lace that I had, just another option. Then I'm going to be using chipboard, which is the book board, and you see, I keep all the little scraps. We might could use that for something else. This stuff is basically if you've got watercolor pads of paper, Let's say you use the watercolor pad of paper for your paper for this, which I do sometimes. I take all the paper out and I use that for these books. This back cover is fantastic and is just as thick or maybe even a tad thicker than the book board. Don't throw these back panels off of your watercolor pads or you mix media pads, or whatever you have. Keep those. That's basically a bookboard, and they're fantastic. I'm going to cut out We'll get a fresh new piece because I'm going to be needing it. I'm going to cut out of this piece a front and a back, but I'm not going to cut a spine because I'm going to do the spine a little bit different. I'm just going to get this cutting board. And I need a utility knife. I'm going to grab my utility knife, which I think is in here, not in here. Who knows where I've hit it from myself. But what I'm going to do is take one of these and decide what size I need. I want it to be I might need two of them. That's right. Because of the size I've picked in the sides these boards come. I need two of these. I'll get a second one out for myself because this is too small. I don't want to be cutting this and the board not even go to the top and the bottom. I'm going to cut it this way and that's how I ended up with extra pieces leftover. Actually I want the spine side to be flush, but I want a little bit of overhang on the top and the front and the bottom. And so I can decide how much overhang by just moving it out and seeing like How much I've got there and thinking, I like that amount of overhang and that's what I'll have leftover on the front because I'm going to draw with my pencil around this. If I double that for here, then I'll have that amount on the top and the bottom. That's about what I want. I'm just going to draw myself a line here and I'm going to use a big ruler and a big utility knife. I actually have a bigger utility knife, but I don't know where it went. You just want a nice sharp utility knife and you want to be careful and not cut yourself. Because we're going to cut the board with this. I can line the board up with the lines on my cut, which would make that nice and easy to get it straight. There we go. Then I'm coming down here Again, I can line the ruler up because it's got the lines on the ruler. I can line the edge of the ruler with the edge of the bookboard, even though my line when I drew it wasn't straight, my line when I cut it will be straight. This is real thick stuff. I'm going to do two or three passes until I've cut it. I'm just real careful, keep it away from your fingers. Don't get in a hurry and a couple passes here with your knife, and that's how you cut the bookboard. You can see it comes right off very easily with minimal stress. All right, Let's just move this this direction. Again, I'm going to just line that up with the top with the side line and the top line and make sure that it's straight. And then I can line the bottom of my piece with the lines on the ruler. I like these rulers like this. You don't have to have this ruler, but I just happen to like it. This is a quilting ruler that you get over there in the fabric department and makes it easy to cut squares and exact size sizes when you're sewing, but I love it. Now I've got this one, I just want a second one in the same size. I'm going to go ahead and mark that. And cut this one out. And just line it up with the line here on the side, make sure that we're straight. We go. Then just save this because you can make other stuff with that, other books, other things with it. I do keep all of that. And now we are ready with our book cover. Now I'm going to have a left and a right or front and the back. I'm going to have my book with a little bit of overhang. That's basically what I'm building. So Got that. Now, need to decide on this fabric. What do I want showing? I like the birds, but they're off the top and I need enough fabric to overhang so that it can do this. I'm definitely not going to get the birds there, but I could get this big thing of flowers. I'm thinking maybe the big thing of flowers is the front. Then I'd be looking at something like this, and that could be the front. I'm digging that. Do you think? I think that's the front. Because if I just come really from the side and you don't really pay attention to what's there, you just end up with whatever's there. Maybe the whole thing is plain. Maybe you like that, but I thought that I would like the flower. Since I can't have the birds, I can at least have the flowers. I'm going to leave myself a good runway of material. I'm just going to doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm going to cut this and leave myself about that much space all the way around so that I've got to fold into the inside. You're not going to see it when it's done, so it doesn't matter if it's perfectly straight or not. Then the piece that I've got leftover, we're going to save that and I'm going to use that in other projects. Got plenty of fabric on that side and this fabric got It's got a lot of hand, but Just do the best you can when you're cutting it and give yourself enough space where if you've cut something off a little bit, you've got plenty of space and it doesn't matter. Now, I'm going to go ahead and trim the top here so that I've still got about that much space. That's about an inch and a half. I'm leaving maybe 2 ". Keep that little scrap. There's my front. Now I want to cut a second piece for the back. Let me set the front to the side and we'll decide what do we want on the back. I like this bird here. If I do the birds on the back, It's got a seam right up the two birds. It'll fold under a little bit, but let's just see what section of this that would give us. I could do that and that be on the back. I'm actually liking that because then we get the birds, even though it's got a seam on it. I don't mind that, but I want the birds. Because the birds are fun. It'll be at the bottom and there'll be a flower at the top. I'm going to see where are the birds, there we go, and we're going to cut that. It's the least efficient way to use your fabric because we're cutting large swaths and little swaths off of it, so you don't end up with a great big piece that you could then use for something else. But when when you're dealing with something like a pattern like this, it just is what it is. You decide if you want to keep part of the beauty of that pattern and cut around it and sacrifice all the little pieces. It just is what it is. I want I wish I'd had that tiny bit longer. Let's do a tiny bit longer because I'm going to cut that little piece off anyway. You'll see what I mean when we get to it. I want plenty of space here. Now we've got our front fabric and our back fabric. We're going to go ahead. We put some of these little ribbons to the side and hope they don't all fall off the desk. We're going to go ahead and sew our signatures together, and then we're going to fix the book cover. I'll put that right there. I'm going to bring my book covers around. We're going to sew these together first. So I'll be right back. I'm will get me some thread. Right. I'm just throwing around some ideas here on the cover. Definitely think I like the pink spine. And now we need to sew these signatures together. One option is to do it like we did on our first project, and so up through the spine and have the spine hold it together. But I think that that's going to make it a little harder for me. Then the book would be like a cloth book and you'd have the gaps in between each piece like we did in our first project. I actually prefer when we don't have those gaps. I'm going to create this with where we sew these together and then maybe glue this onto there, and then attach where this is up underneath. The book cover, it's going to be like underneath that because then if it's underneath that, holding all those in. It's what you see at the very end here. But then we could come over with an overlay over the spine for a decoration. Just throwing some ideas around. I actually have the burlap in brown, which I could get the brown burlap, that might even be better. Then I could wrap it in. I'm just throwing some ideas around here. I definitely want the pink. I'm going to cut it longer than I need it because I'm going to instead of sewing this down. This has a wire in it. I can take this and fold it down and then fold it again and put glue up under here and that be a finished top and bottom. I need enough of the ribbon to do that. I'm just going to give myself some extra length, but cut that piece of ribbon so that we can do that. And I put that to the side. I'm going to mark where we're going to put our holes. I'm going to line these all up and I'm going to go ahead and number these because I need these to stay in order. I just put a number at the very bottom because when I'm sewing all over the place, like rotating it around and stuff like that. I need for these to stay in the same order that I intended. Then you just have to decide how many stitches are you going to do. Before I was doing one in the middle, one in that, and then one a little further. We can still do that. That does make it nice and tight all the way down. I'm going to mark a mark here in the middle with my pencil, and then just decide, I think I do want to do the same one at 2 ", one at 2 ". Then we've got 2 " to the end because I need these to also stay tight enough so that I'm going to glue those so that a book where all the things are glued even the sections that are moving from one section to the next. I want these to all stay. I've just got another little ruler that's just handy. I'm just going to draw that mark all the way up all four pieces. But I'm thinking that I want it to I'm glue, I'm going to sew it, I'm going to glue the end, and then I'm going to put this over the end and glue that, and then I will be ready to glue the cover. It's the direction I'm going. Now I need my all. I've got my little Amazon kit here. It's it's my favorite. It's convenient and now it's the way I want to do everything and then my bone folders on the other table, but I did have a little one that I was just using. The little kit comes with the bone folders. It comes with a long one and a short one bone folder, it comes with the needles, comes with the waxed thread, which is protective of the thread and protective of the pages, so it doesn't fray and it doesn't tear your paper and all. You can buy these all separate, but this kit with all these pieces and it was only seven bucks, totally worth it and it's now my favorite. I'd recommend that. If you don't have the book materials. If you already have your own all and you have your own thread, use what you got. But if you don't, I highly recommend that. This signature, these have five pages in it, folded in half and I have included two pieces of already painted art because what else am I going to do with that art? If you've got some that you've already painted in the same paper in the same size, you can include these in this book and be a couple paint things up. I'm just going to fold it backwards so that I can then come in to this hole, and I want to come in at an angle because I'm trying to come out on the back side on the fold and sometimes I get it all right and sometimes I don't. It might actually now that I think about it because they move, might help if you have a clamp helping you keep these papers from moving as you are going down the line. That actually is helpful because they do move as you're going. It might be helpful to clamp both sides and just that way you can keep it. Where you need it. I don't know if that moved or not, did that consider clamps because they do move as I'm moving down this page. I've had by the time I get to the end, I'm way off to the side. I don't worry about that too much. I just try to poke it again and get in the center because extra holes in the paper are okay. I can just paint or collage over those when I get to actually painting that page. Then once you get it folded back, I'm just going to get it nice and tight and set that to the side. This is why I need to number what was the right order and which way was up? Because you want all of these to line up when you're done, if you get them flipped around or turned around the other ways, they do not line up anymore, and that sucks. The whole book doesn't line up they'll be like this sewn together. Let's go backwards. Let's go ahead and clamp our paper so that it doesn't move around and we'll take our all and do the second one and I'm going to do all four just like this. Clamps are the way to go. This is like the best ones I've poked holes in. In the several classes that I've now made. See, the more you do, you start thinking, oh, I like this or Ooh, this is it right here. Helps if you're folding it as you're pushing because then you go in at the right angle. These little clips. Those are fantastic to have. If you've got any of those or any other clips there, definitely grab those. That's number four. I'm going to start with number one and grab a needle, great big needle with a big hole, a end. You can double these if you want it to be super strong or you can just do it single, The spirit is already super strong. I think I'm going to not use double. I'm going to use single. What I'm going to do is just start right at the bottom, and I'm going to weave my way all the way through this and then back down and that's going to be my starting piece. Usually I not it, but I think I'm going to do I'm going to try something different this time because on that first book, we come back at the end and double knot these together. I think I'm going to do that rather than have a whole bunch of knots go on. I'm just going to leave myself a tail and I'm going to try not to pull it out. I'm just going to zig zag my way all up and down this going in one hole and then up to the next one and come back through that hole. I lost my way here. There we go. And then back through the last hole. Then I'm just going to come right back down and go back into the hole that we have right below it. I'm just going to make myself a little ladder here. I can keep pulling these tau if I want, and then back through that hole there. Come out on the back side, go back in the hole right below it. I don't want to come through the thread that's there. I want to clear the thread. If you're stuck in the middle of the thread, pull your needle back out, so you're not stuck in the middle of that thread. Then I think what I'm going to do is come back down. I'm going to loop around this right here two times to lock that size right there because I really want minimal nodding. I've noticed on the other ones, I had more nodding, I was doing it the correct official way that they tell you to do these things. I've just looped around that twice. I'm going to go back in. I've done it like the official way. But after you do things like the official way and you're like, maybe I'd like to do it this other way. Definitely experiment, and now we can tie this off. I'm just going to cut myself a thread and I can double knot that, and then I can leave it. I can cut the pieces. I could have done that on the outside. That would have been even better if I had already had that on the outside. That's okay, though. I'm just going to leave myself a little thread in there. I'm just talking out loud and thinking as we're doing that. Then I could in the end flip this over and this could be like the top instead of coming out the bottom. I'm just thinking out loud. For the next one, we're going to attach Book one to book two on the next one, and I've got enough threads, I'm going to go ahead and start the next one. I wish I had not cut that off now that I did that. I think what I'm going to do come over here and not this on this piece here. Actually I actually should have just kept going. I'm just nodding this on here, and that'll just let me keep on going to the next one so that we're continuing rather than cutting it off. Now this is book two. I'm just going to go through the first whole I'm attaching one to book two at this point. I've just gone through the first hole, I'm going to come up through the second hole. I just got out of order. This is why I checked the order. I need this to be on this side. This is why I put those in order. If you do that to, just no, I do that too. We're going to go back through the bottom hole. Now I'm going to come up through the second hole. There we go. Then to attach these two, to pull this tight because that's going to pull that tight for me. Then what I'm going to do to attach that second hole to the first hole is come up through number one on this side of that thread going through that hole and come back through the second one. Then I've made a loop right around our piece, and then I'm going to go right back in the hole here of number two and come right there and pull it tight, and then I'm going to go that center hole of number two. And We're going to come up here and come on this side of the thread on the side of that hole and back down the other side and I've made myself another loop. Now I'm going to go back through the center of that hole for number two. And then come back up through the fourth hole and left side and right side, making yourself a loop again. And then back through that same hole. There we go. I've managed not to keep my thread tight on that one. I came right through the thread. That's why. Let's see if I can back through that. By just pulling that I like, is that is why you want to be careful not to go through the threads. But if you do, just pull it out and then keep going. B the top hole, L et me close it here. Go back through the top hole, and here I'm making my last little loop, making sure all those have pulled tight now, not leaving them loose. Pulling through our top piece here, and I'm just going to loop around that and back with number three. Now I'm attaching number three. Because if you go back in at this point, you have to come back out somehow. It's going to be like this one down here where we've just gone from the last hole and we're going to skip and come down to number three. Still making sure I'm all in order. I'm going to go through the first hole of number three. There we are. And pull that tight. Come back through the second hole of number three. Now, I don't want to go back up to the first hole because we've already looped around that. But there is a little loop here between hole one and one and two, I do want to go underneath that one. Underneath the two loops like underneath these two loops here to attach number three. You might have to just open these two if you don't have a round needle, which I've ordered myself a round needle, and it should be here later today, but I wanted to make this book this morning. But you can come inside and then loop it back outside if you don't have a round needle and you can't get it to come through as easy. You could just Go through the two sections and find it. Now I'm looped underneath those two, and I've made myself a new loop. I'm going to go back down between the middle of number three. Try not to snag that thread if I want to come back in on the outside. I think what I'm going to do real quick because my thread is coming down is I'm going to go ahead and not two pieces together. I'm actually going to run that right under there so that it grabs it so that I can not it easier. Makes it a lot easier. There we go. I just made myself a not coming in there. I can just cut those off. You can cut it off completely, but I'm going to leave a little lip there and hopefully give myself enough to go through the two books here. Just another through the last two sections I meant. All right. Now I've got another thread ready to go right length, long enough, and now we're going to come back through this hole in the middle to the outside. There we go. And look on the inside and make sure we've pulled that tight. Then we can come through the two. I've actually managed to make that work. There we go. Let see I'm right up under those loops there. Then just that and then we're going to go right back through this hole that we just came through. There we go. And then we'll pull that tight and we'll go through the fourth hole and do the same thing. Right through that hole right there, the two loops right through that. I've got the little half round book needles coming so you can see how sticking around needle in there would give you the edge. Now I've made a dozen books in a row and I'm like, Oh, totally need that needle. B that same hole, pull it tight up through the last hole. There we go. Pulling it tight. I'm going to loop under the one piece that I have available there since it's not a double thread, and now I'm ready to go to book number four, making sure it's still in the same direction and making sure that inside of book number three, it's no weird loops. I'm going to go straight from that two number four, that first hole down there in section four. Excellent. Then back up through the next hole. We're just going to do the exact same thing that we just did on the other three sections. I'm going to cut this tail off. It's in my way. Then we are just going to loop between the two sections number three and number four. Each time, you're just moving down to the last little loop you had there. If you can't get your needle to pop back out easily, you can just go in between the two sections and pull it back out. The needles right here, can just push it through that way. Then pull it tight, we've got a nice little loop, and then we're going to go right back in that same hole. L et me find the center of number four. There we go. So I'm going back in the number four hole. There we go. And I'll finish all the way to the end doing the same thing. Last hole. Now, just make sure everything inside is pulled tight. Now I'm going to go in this last one right here and I'm going to go ahead and get that. I could come back in that one. Let's go back in to number. That hole that we just came out of. Here we go. Because we're looped around, I'm just going to pull it tight, and then I'm going to loop around and tie that off on the inside. I go up underneath that. And then I do it again because that first loop just tightens it there. Make a loop and then I'm just going to come through the loop, and then I will be able to pull that all the way down and tie and knot that off. I can do a double knot, which is what I prefer, I do that again. I just loop it underneath this loop here, and then this loop that I just created, I just go through that and pull it tight and now I have myself a double knot there. I've pulled it because I pulled it tight, that got loose. I pull it back out, I'll give myself enough room out here on the spine. There we go. Now I've got my spine, my book together. At this point, it's really nice if you have some big clamps and I'm going to glue the spine. Let me go grab those clamps. 10. No Sew Hard Cover Journal - Finishing Cover & Book: All right. I actually have the little clamps right here beside me. But I'm going to go ahead. These are great big clamps from the hardware store. You don't have to do this. I do this because it makes it easier. You clamp it in between some big heavy books if you wanted. But I'm going to go ahead and clamp this and this paper is nice and thick. If the paper were thinner and more delicate, I would put something in between the clamp and the paper to protect it. But because the paper is thick and this doesn't really do any damage to the thick paper, and I glue the front piece down to my book cover, you're never going to see this where I've got this clamp, so I just don't worry about it. Now this is what our book looks like. Now I'm going to take the PVA glue and I have a brand new bottle, and I'm just going to cut myself a spout and remove the glue thing here. Then this glue is acid free and hop I cut that down py low for the lid. It's acid free and it dries clear. I'm just going to shake it up a little because it seemed very liquid. Then I'm going to glue the spine. Because I've clamped it together, it'll glue these pieces right here together on this side, but when I get to the inside, I'll be able to still open it, but I won't be able to see the spine through it, which is why I do this. This is super liquidy today. I'm basically going and you could also I think I might use the other. This is super liquidy. Let me put that over there. I'm going to use the tacky glue, the acid free tacky glue because it's thicker and it dries clear and it's another popular book binding glue. It dries clear, it's tacky, and I'm just trying to get the top edge. I don't want the glue to drip in between the pages really, but I do want to glue this little edge here. You can see here, I'm just going in between and then I have a little cheat so I can keep on working, which I'm going to show you. Because it'll take 30 minutes to an hour to really set up. Then I wouldn't open the book until tomorrow. Once I've got everything attached and going, We're not actually going to open it up until tomorrow. For the moment, I'm going to set this to the side because I want this to dry a little bit. Let's go ahead and sew the front cover and then I'll show you the cheat, but I do want that to set up a tiny bit before I do the next thing. Well, actually, it doesn't matter. I'm going to. I'm going to use my book tape. I've got some book repair tape. You could also use the gaffers tape, which they've got a Gaffer book repair tape. I'm using white, it's the same color just about as what we're using here. T. And I might have to trim it again. But I do about the length of our book, and I'm putting this on one side and I'm just going to smooth that down, and I'm going to pull it taught over to the other side and smooth that down. That's going to let me keep on going and have an added benefit of making making it extra strong back there. I plan on beating up on my journal. Now I'm going to set this on the floor and let it just stand up just like that and start setting up while I work on the cover. And we'll come back to what we're going to do here after we've let that set for a little bit. Let's see here. Now got our covers, got one piece. This is going to be the back. It's the one with the seam. That's like the most liquid PVA glue I've ever seen. Not sure. What's up with that? Set this up here. The other one I had was a lot less liquid. I feel like that's got water in the or something. I'm going to try not to dump this all over the place there we go. Yeah, I like the a little bit thicker glue. Now, for this spine, I'm actually going to try to use a glue stick and see how that does with the fabric because I just want to get it attached and not moving around and I don't need it to be super gluey. With the glue and all. Let's just see where this is going to end up. If I like what that's doing, and then the bottom would fold down. Yes, I do I like that. I'm good with that. Let's just go for it. I'm going to glue stick this down, and we'll just see how that works. This is just a stick from the blick and see how that works for us. In the end, we'll have other things that are stick in this too, so this won't be the end all But a really nice layer. I could have use also some of my theses, I could have used the yes paste, which is super nice and thick. Let's just about the middle and see if we'd like where we got it. I've got the seam is crooked, which I did not want that seam to do that. That was weird. There we go. Let's make sure the seam is mostly straight. Then what I'm going to do is take my scissors and then cut like almost like a little y shape out of this here. I don't want it to be to I want to be about an eighth of an inch from the tip, don't cut it to the tip. A little angle shape there with about an eighth of an inch left outside that tip. If you're using a glue stick and you don't feel like it did what it was supposed to do. You could go back and try some other glues, the yes paste, a fabric glue. You could use this tacky glue, the tacky glue is a good choice. But man, when you're doing little pieces of fabric, it's it's guy and there's a lot going on. I'm going to glue the one side here. Let's just see did we pull that same goods pretty straight. Then I'm actually going to do the opposite side. I'm still okay. It doesn't matter if there's a little bit where there's no glue because this is going to be covered with more with a piece of paper and more glue. We got redundancies here. We just want it to definitely be tacked, but it doesn't have to be perfect. Let's see what we got. I love it. Then do each end. Then you'll notice that this cardboard is slightly boeing a little bit with the wet glue and stuff on it. That's okay. We're going to when we're all done, set this under a stack of books for overnight and then that just flattens right back out as it dries. Then just go ahead and pull that. I do want it on the edges here, so I'm going to come back up and try to get that edge. There we go. Beautiful. All right, and we'll do the other side and then we'll do the other piece. I usually have a piece of wax paper to protect my table surface as I'm doing that. But I wasn't thinking. All right. We'll get the end here. We'll get the end here. If you end up with too much on that edge, you can just clip it. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're looking for beautiful imperfection, basically, but there's our back cover. What I love it. Let me go grab my bone folder. Sitting on the other table. Now we can just really one extra little smooth down. Make sure there was no weird air bubbles or like a hunk of glue that'll just smooth everything down. Oh, this is so pretty. And now I'm going to do the other piece the exact same way. The reason I go from one end to the other and one side to the other because if you go here to side, you're liable to pull the pattern in a direction that you didn't intend and it could stretch in that direction, whereas if you go side to side and then top to bottom, you won't be pulling your pieces in ways that you didn't intend and pull the fabric off center because this fabric definitely would pull off center. I can feel it. It's got a lot of movement, a lot of hand there, and I just don't want to risk that as I'm pulling that tight for a good edge. And again, don't worry about what the inside looks like. You're not going to see it when we're done. All right. Now we got our front and our back. Look how pretty that is. Oh. Oh my gosh. I can't even tell you how excited I am that this piece of fabric is going to be something amazing like literally. Got the front. And our book back up here and I'm going to cheat. I'm going to stick with my tachy glue. I'm going to tacky glue this. This is the acid free tacky glue, if you use glue on your piece like this. You want to make sure that it's not going to yellow as it ages. I'm just going to glue this down. It's going to be on the inside, so I don't have to double fold that. But I want it to be the right length. Now let me just measure this. I need it to fold right here, and then I'm going to cut off the extra here in just a minute. But let me make sure I definitely have the right size. I feel like I need a tiny bit more fold. I like that this ribbon has metal in it, has the little wire in it because that's working out great. I like that right there. Now, I'm going to cut a little extra off of here and glue this side down to. And you see you can do this no so. You just got to be about your edges and giving yourself some space to maybe finish edges off. Now what I'm going to do I'm going to make this like the inside spine and it's going to go like that. I'm going to tacky glue this whole thing. I really wanted to make sure it stays. And because all the ribbon here this all has finished edges basically. And we're going to glue the cover on top of this. It doesn't matter if I'm edge to edge, but now I do want to make it even, I want to make sure I'm in the center there. Yes, right there. Look at that. Oh my gosh. We want that to set up. I'm going to t that do something weird. I want that to set up. I'm going to let that sit for a minute and I'll be right back. I have been letting this set up for a bit and it's not dry, but it is at least firm enough, I think, for me to go ahead and attach the cover. Need to decide, do I want these tied off strings to be at the top or the bottom because I could decide if one is on the top versus the bottom at this point. That one's tied off fine that's tied off in the middle. Does it even matter because I could cut the strings off in the end it's not like it's in the way and or I could just weave them back into what's going on here so that they're not even a consideration. Your choice if the strings bother you or not or tie off on the outside if you think that is going to bother you. Now, I need to decide, am I going to do a wraparound because I need to glue the wrap around piece in between the cover and what I have created? Because of the way I've done the spine, you can see that that's now on the inside and I am thinking that what I want to do is have like a secondary spine here on the outside, which it's sticking up at the moment because the overhang is supposed to be on the front. But I'm wanting maybe a secondary spine so that we're seeing that lovely pink spine. Let me get it lined up here. Let's get this lined up. Overhang is on the front, you can see a little overhang over here and I hopefully have the same overhang on the top and the bottom. This is the backside. I can tell, I got the birds, that's the back of the book. But just to judge what I'm thinking. Thinking a secondary spine attached on the outside. We have basically like an inner spine and an outer spine look. That's what I was hoping. I could also take a piece of ribbon. And we could have some ribbon pieces as say a topper here. I'm going to have a piece of ribbon there, piece of ribbon here, so that it looks like like that where you have almost like two spines. You know what we could do. We could actually wrap that all the way around, like the back, and then that could be like that, and I could make it short here on the front so I could see the whole front. That's one option. Just thinking out loud here. Or I could just have the ribbon on the spine do like right here, maybe have three or four of them, and then it can come around that same amount of length on the front. Then that would be like a secondary spine where we're seeing the inside spine, but we're almost visually tying the front and the back together. It doesn't look like it's floating on top of that. Then we could Because I'm using that color. I could use yellow too. I really like the yellow. Which one do you like better? Do you like the yellow? I need a little vote button. Do we like the yellow or do we like this lovely rust? Because then I could have these ribbon pieces over here. Then over here, I could have that attached where it's now a wrap around closure that we can then wrap around and close our book. We'll have the ribbon pieces and the wrap around closure basically. We could tie it off or we could have a button or we could do a lot of different stuff, but we could have a little wrap around closure and the little ribbon closures here. I'm feeling this rust because it is really pretty. I know I'm all over the place there, but I think that's where I'm going with it. Let's go ahead. I need to I'm going to wrap it, I need to have the wrapping available coming out the back side. How much do we want to wrap this? It's coming out the back. It could wrap like that and then just tie off possibly. Let's just do two wrap arounds and that'll give me some choices. I definitely need to know that because I need to attach that in the back. Let's go ahead and attach the back. This would be the time to. If you wanted some type of ribbon coming down in the middle, keeping your place for you, you would have attached that underneath this piece, that's where I would stick that. If you think you want a ribbon coming through, put that ribbon on and then put this on and then that could then keep your place inside. This is what I'm going to do here for the backside. I'm attaching this inside piece to the back cover. Now that covers all of our seams and you don't see that. A lot of people have a different cover on here themselves, like a separate piece, and then they leave this free floating. I wanted this to be part of the front thing. Feels like to me, it makes it stronger when that's part of it. When I'm using the book, it just feels stronger. I want to line this up on the outside, exactly where I want it. Let's make sure it's exactly where we want it. Thinking about right there. Maybe in a tiny bit. I'm thinking right there. What I'm going to have to do. What I'm going to have to do is put the glue on and then we'll realign that back up. Let's just go ahead and do it. I'm putting the glue on this because this is completely covering that. If I put it on the books on the book back, I am going to maybe put it too far out and then that would suck. I'm going to use the tacky glue again because I like it. It's easy. I could I could go ahead and use the liquid pH PVA. Let's just use this because maybe it's just what's up top that's so liquidy. I'm definitely going to get some glue here on this. I'm not too worried here about getting it even because I can just take a random tag now and spread this around. I am wanting to make sure it's just on this paper, not the papers underneath it because I'm using a paper that's not completely even. I don't want necessarily want to have the glue on the paper below it. This glue the last PVA glue I had was a whole lot thicker. I think on just the spine part, I'm going to come through with a little extra tacky glue because I really want this to stay on the spine. And I'm just going to spread that out. Once you've got that, nice and covered and you feel pretty good about it. Now, I am going to try to get this on the right spot. Once you think you've got it, now get your bone folder out and spread that nice spread that on here, and then I'm going to shut the book and let that be doing its thing. But you'll see that piece of paper is now covering all the edges of book cover that we made. I just want that to sit on that nice and heavy while I do the top cover. Again, the top cover, I'm just trying to get exactly even with how I did the bottom cover. I'm getting excited too, man. This is looking good. I might as well use this on there because I don't want to waste it, but I don't know that I don't know I was thicker than the other bottle of this stuff I had Tth. Just not even getting out what I want to say. I keep a baby wipe handy, just wipe all that off my fingers. Then this is Yes, this is up. I'm just making sure I've got this lined up with the back cover and com where I want it to come on the spine. That's just your judgment going in there, but that's how I'm wanting that to look, that's where I'm trying to line that up. Then I'm going to open that page up and smooth that out. This is the one that I've got the art on it. That's fun. And I'm going to use the bone folder. Let's just flip it over. Now that we're there. I got glue on my thing. Not what I wanted to do. This glue dries clear and I've got baby wipes. If you do that, use a baby wipe and wipe it back off. It's not going to hurt anything and it'll dry clear. Ls you're using a velvet, then that's probably not good. But this is exactly I keep baby wipe sandy. We've flipped that over and what I want to do is take my bone folder and just really smooth that down because this paper has got a texture to it. I want to make sure it all gets smoothed down. If you squeeze any glue outside the paper, then just take your baby wipe, and again, just clean that edge up. Then we're going to let the sit. This is I'm going to glue the top part on it. But we're going to let this sit closed overnight so that it has a chance to do its thing as far as the cover drying, the edges drying. What I want to do, I'll stack it under a bunch of heavy books, but what I want to do, is what I just forgot. This was the back. This is the front. I forgot to attach our ribbon. That I said, We need this. Let's just we're not completely dry, dry yet. I don't think. This was our piece that I wanted to come around at the front. I'm going to try to sneak it in here anyway. Then I'll glue this back down because it's still tacky at the moment. It's set up pretty good though. But I'm going to try to sneak this just under the edge. I did it with the non velvet side and the velvet down because then when I close it, that's going to allow the velvet to wrap around the book and the velvet side. I was thoughtful there with how I wanted to do that. Then because I've pulled this ale bit, I'm just going to run a little bit of glue right down this edge. If you forget that, like I just did because I'm talking at the same time, you got a few minutes, but after that, it's probably set. Then this side, just wanted to make sure we get all that attached. Then we need to decide, now this will wrap around exactly like we want it, and we can decide how we want to do that. But I still think I want to have a ribbon edge on here, going from about there and on the back. Yes. That's exactly what I want. Just got to decide where we want that. Let me get them all the same size about right there. Not worried about the edges, and yes, it will fray, and that's what makes an art journal pretty to me. I'm okay with that. But you could sew these if you're sewer and you don't want to do that, go for it. You don't have to do this at all this way, you can pick any of the different art things that we've done in class, but I'm getting creative here. Am I think three or four. Let's look, there's. We'll have one here. Yeah, I'm thinking three. Definitely three. So I'll tacky glue these on here, and we could see where the exact center is. The center is at We're at 12.5. Center is at six and a quarter. I'm going to set this one right here, and then we might put this one in 2-3 and this one in 10-11. Maybe I'll come down a hair. I think I want that further down, actually. Let's see. I'm thinking about right there. I'm going to have about the same amount on the front on all three of these. I'm just going to You know what? I think I'm going to run well, I'm going to run the tacky glue on the front side, and just get that set and then we'll flip it over. Then we can still trim it when we flip it over we didn't get it exact. Not firmly pushing it yet. Is that where we want it? Do I it where I want it. Make sure they're straight. I think that's where I want it. We're just committing. I'm squeezing those down, and we're going to let them do their thing for a moment as I move them accidentally. We're that set up for a second. Before I flip it over. Are they all in the p? Let's see. Let's get them all in the same place while we still have time. I'm going to let that sit up for a moment and I'll be right back. I've let that sit for a bit so that these have firmed up a little bit and we're going to flip this to the other side. Now, I should be even when I glue all of these three down, what I'm going to do is just check that. This actually looks a little crooked, and then I'm going to shorten this a tiny bit since I just did that. Again, just looking for close doesn't have to be perfect, perfect, but I would like it to be nice. Now, I am going to glue this to the spine and this top part here. Just going to go ahead and get my glue on here ready. And then, let's just loop it up and around. If you have any glue ooze out, just have a baby white handy or like a damp towel would work. But I just want to make sure I don't have a glue bubble hanging out. We're going to need to that set up before we flip it over and see if we're done. I'll be back. Now that I've given that time to set up, it's not completely dry, but it is set up enough where I can now look at the book and see how is it going to look as I'm going forward? Almost wish it was a little tighter, but if it's too tight, then when we go to open the book and use it, it'll be too tight and not lay flat, currently, as you can see, we can lay p flat. This is why you don't want to open it early. I'm going to close this back up. But this will glue together tomorrow. Be set so that in between each section, we have a completed section. Definitely not dry. But I'm going to, I'm going to stack this under a stack of books tonight. Then I have this part that I can use as a wrap around and closure as I'm working in the book. I like that. As it gets thicker, I have a little extra, little extra ribbon there. If I decide later, I've got too much ribbon, I can just trim that. That's fun. I do have a little scraggs here I could get rid of that is my completed no so cover using fabric and something that I find really beautiful, just some extra decoration that I thought I would like on mine. Hope you enjoy creating your own version, your own cover. You could do something different for the spine if you wanted to do something different. But I just thought that would be interesting and something that I hadn't done before. Hope you enjoy this project. I can't wait to see what books that you guys are creating and I will see you back in class. 11. Small Grommet Spine Book - Supplies: Let's take a look at the supplies that you'll need for this project. I'm just making a fabric cover and I had two fabrics. I had a front fabric for the face, and then there is a second fabric for the inside. These are upholstery weight fabrics and that is perfect for a book cover. Then inside, I personally chose a handmade cotton paper. My silk threads are shedding. But I use the hand torn cotton paper that I got off of Amazon that I liked. These are really beautiful papers, and they're from leather village, which is a village in India. It's an Indian made cotton paper, and it's handmade by artisans that make paper. Then I'm using a silk ribbon that's I came this way and was like a vintage ribbon that the ribbon lady had died in different colors. You can use any ribbon. I just liked the way this looks with this tall fabric that I was using. Then I'm using a a gramma kit, and the gramma kit is to do grommets on the spine so that we have a big enough hole to pull ribbons through and then tie off. Then extras that I did I glued ribbon on the inside and the outside because I did the stitching and I didn't love the stitching and so that's how I completed that off. Now you could make these covers even a little larger. I recommend you make it about the size of the paper plus an inch or a little bit more than an inch because once you get the papers in there, you might end up with it short. I don't mind that. I could go back and tear these if I want these all in the book. But once you fold it around it, you've got to figure these signatures have a bulk to them. Maybe an inch more. Experiment with that. Then once you get this cut out. You could sew it all on the inside and flip it all out and have nice themes. I like for an art journal for these things to eventually fray. I like that, not sewn correctly look personally. Then That's why mine are not sewn, but you could definitely figure extra and sew those and turn that right side out again. But I've done a pretty little ribbon on the inside and a pretty ribbon on the outside covering my stitches because I liked it and I made a little bow on top of a button. That's basically what we're using. To be fabric, the paper of your choice, the gramic tool kit, some ribbon to be your binding material and your decoration. Then you need your tools for book binding. You need your bone, folder, you need your all. You need your needle for your project, which I have around here. Here we go. You need your sewing needle. The bigger the needle, the better, especially if you're doing ribbon because those are harder to get through the needle. Then let's see, what else is in here. I used some scissors. Instead of thread because normally you would use a waxed thread. But instead of thread, I used that ribbon. If you're not going to use the ribbon, then you need the waxed thread. That's the basic tools that I'm using in this class. I kept it simple. I wanted it to be easy and doable. It does take a little, man power to pull the ribbon through the paper, but that's the most complicated part of that, just trying to get that ribbon through. Other than that, this is a very easy way to make a really lovely art journal to be working in. Let's get started. 12. Small Grommet Spine Book: Hello, everyone. Today, I'm going to make a journal with a fabric cover that's going to be really simple cover, but to make it fancy, I've used I'm going to use a pretty fabric and a pretty second fabric. Then I found some vintage ribbons that were hand dyed, that I got at a ribbon store a while back, the antique store had a ribbon. Booth in it and the lady had handed all these. I use them for photography props for a long time, but I just remembered, I have a bag of ribbons and I'm thinking that I'm going to do a different binding on this fabric than I've done on the other ones that we've done in class to give you another option. I want to pick one of these that I think is going to compliment this the best. Wondering if I like that one the best because that one pulls out all these lighter greens. That might be the way to go. This one was a little more vivid, but I don't think that color is really in this fabric, so maybe not that one. This one's a little greener. That might not really be in that fabric either. Now that I've had a chance to study this and think about it for a moment, I feel like this might be the right color. I'm going to pick a section out of here. I'm going to make a little smaller sketchbook watercolor book because I want different types of watercolors. But you can make this with A paper that you happen to have and want to use. You can mix it with the vintage papers and do the Junk journal thing where you mix all kind of interesting papers in there. Your choice on what you actually put into your paper pack. But I've got some new papers to try. These are cotton papers from the leather village. I got a rough handmade paper set and a smooth handmade paper set. I like that they put in here who the artisan was that made your paper, that's super cool. I think I'm going to use the rough paper because I actually really like it and fold it in half. It would make a journal about this size, which is about 5 " by 7 ". About a five by seven journal with this paper. I think it's pretty cool. I'm thinking that that would be a great size. Then I'm looking at this upholstery fabric, that's a tall with some different colors. I used a tiny bit of this in our very first journal, the one with the different stripes of stuff. This has got a lady in it, some people in it. I could figure out which section of this, I want to be my journal. I only need it to be like this big with just a tiny bit of an overhang. Do I want it to be like this? That do I want to have the people in it, or do I just want it to have the trees because I really like the trees, or do I want trees on one side? People on the other, that's a possibility, or do I want it all trees because I do have just color and trees down on this end. I like this palm tree right here actually. Really if I did this right here, I could have palm tree on the front and look like that. I'm going to look around at what I want this to be. What I'm going to do is this is going to be the top of the journal, like we did on our other ones, and then this is going to be the underside of the top. I'm going to cut two pieces out of one piece out of this fabric, one piece out of this fabric, and this is that corduroy feeling fabric. I just think it's cool, and it's going to be the back side of this front. I'm going to cut it. A I'm going to give it we'll say quarter of an inch all the way around because it's going to overhang just a little bit, and then that would be like the size of the book when we're done, which would be a good size. I'm going to go ahead and cut this out, giving myself about a quarter of an inch all the way around and then I'm going to cut out that same size out of this fabric. Then I'm going to go to my swar machine and I'm going to do a zigzag stitch all the way around just to keep the two fabrics together. I'll be right back. All right. I have sewn this two pieces, if I cut it the same size. I had the right side facing up and the u Corderoy side of this facing up also, so the wrong sides are together. I just did a zigzag stitch all the way around. Then I thought, it'd be nice not to see that stitch. I decided to just take some of the ribbon that we're already going to use and glue it around my cover here. Then I took a little bit of this ribbon and a button and I made a rose out of it, which was actually really easy to do. You just grab the end and then run this in a circle. Until it's big enough. Then I had a rose that I could put a glob of glue down on my button, I just glued it to the button like that and I ended up with a pretty rose. Then I thought on the inside, be nice, but I didn't see that stitch two. I just glued a little piece of some random coring that I had and a little button to finish off the edge and they're still wet because I just finished glue in it. I just thought that would be pretty because that button will be on the inside and that'll be there on the top. I thought that'd be really pretty as a finished journal. Then this is going to have some sticking out here on the edge from the way we're going to stitch it. Don't you think that'd be fantastic? Now we need to decide while that's drying, just I just picked a size that was a little bigger than my paper, and then when I fold my paper in half, hopefully, this will cover all our handmade sheets. Now we need to decide how many sheets of paper and these are all different sizes. They're not the same size. Just do the best you can with whatever paper you're working with. But we just need to see how many sheets of paper would make a fantastic little art journal to play and sketch in and you could carry it around with you and you could paint and decide, That's pretty thick right there. I might want to do I might want to do even two signatures. If I did five sheets, that would fold down really nicely. If I did ten sheets, that would be like 20 pieces. There's five. If I did set five, one, two, three, four, five, I think that was five, one, two, three, four, five. If I did two of these, would that might be too much, but then again, I might like it. Maybe six pieces of paper. Maybe I'd like six pieces of paper. We can always take one out. Let's just see because I want to fold it and press it real tight with my bone folder, and they're all different sizes, so I'm just going to do the best I can to get it in the middle. Then I'm going to get my bone folder. I've put all my little tools here in a tin. Now I have a little tin that I can have my bookmaking supplies in. They were in a little bag, but I like the little tin. I'm just going to press that down with them all together. And then I'm going to do the other one the same way. If they poke out of my cover, I'm okay with that because they're hand torn, so it's going to be really pretty. I could have made the cover tiny bit bigger. You just judge how you want to do that. If I do two of those, I will hang out a little tiny bit, but it's still really pretty. I'm doing that right there. Now, I'm going to mark these and we're going to put three holes, one in the center. Let's see. Let me get my pencil. I'm going to mark it about right there, because it's only two, I'm just pulling it up. Uh 2.5 " from that I think is where I'm going to go. That's not perfect. That's all right. Then this is 12. I don't remember I don't forget which sides up and which side, which one goes right behind the next. Then think what I'm going to do is take my little all and take one piece of this and mark this fabric because that hole in the fabric is not even going to matter because we're going to do something that we haven't done With this. We're going to use grommets on the outside. Let's just mark these and hope I can find Let's see. At that. I'm going to get Let get this right here so that that will mark it. Then where was the next one? Oh, my goodness. No, I can't see it. That's hilarious. Let's see if we can do better. Did I get the right spot? Yes, I did. Now Hang on. Want to make sure. Let me get Where's my bull clip. Let's bull clip this. There we go. Make sure it's not going to move on us. There we go. That's going to be the center of my g basically. I'm going to mark the next one. Just go straight down. There we go. There's the center of my Gromet. And then the third one. There's the center of my grommet. There we go. Now we can see them. I think that's right. Then that one will be right there. Yeah, it's close enough. We'll put that one back on here. While I've got all out, I'm going to go ahead and punch my holes here. G will be big enough that we've got a little bit of if it's not p. We still be fine. I'm going to fold this backwards, and then I do like to once I fold it, g hold this in the same place here. Then punch that hole at an angle, so you come right out on the fold of that. I'm going to do the same thing on this one. So much easier if you have this thing holding this paper. Steady for you. We come right out where we're supposed to. And I'll do that on this other one. Get these two down. All right. So there's number one, and let's just do number two. All right. Now we got one and we got two. What I'm going to do now is we're going to put grommets in here. I've got a little gram tool kit. This one I did get the one with the hand grommet plier thing, but tested it out. I know how to use this kit. I got a little gramt box. We've got a little grommet tool. I'm going to use the smaller grommet, I want the smaller tool. There we go. R grommet for the right tool there, and I want the smaller gram tool, which I'm going to go ahead and attach to my little grommet hammer here. Then we want three gromts. This is a 38 inch grommet. I believe before actually just grommeted those holes down without this thing, but that's actually the top of the grommet. It's been so long since I've used my little grommet things. I'm going to flip this over. Still being careful. It's not dry dry, but it's getting close. This goes underneath that protects your t and then you make a hole with your hole and you just hammer that until you're all the way through that fabric. And we're going to completely cover the whole. Just as good as you can because you're not going to see this underneath. There we go. Now we got a hole. What we do is we have this little get tool that that sits right there, sits right on the piece of wood, grommet comes right through the top. We should have our top of our grue there, and then we put our grum Piece right here and we hammer this down. And you hamer it until it's down and tight. You don't want to be loose at all. Then we have our lovely little grum think that probably should have been the back because that's a little prettier. But since I did them that way, we're going to do all three that way, so they look the same, but doesn't matter either way. You just have to know when you're making it way do you want that to be on the front of the back? It'll work either way. I'm going to do the next one. All right. And once you got your grants set, we are ready. We put all these little pieces back over here. This gramma tool is pretty handy. I like having it. I had that for a long time, but it's the same set that you can get now. I think I got it at Home Depot, but I've also found them on Amazon. I do love my little gram tool kit. Now we have three lovely grammt holes that are going to be the spine of our book basically, which may push these out a little further. If it pushes them out too far, we could always trim our paper. We could always tear the paper shorter. I could have figured a little bit longer on these. But when I tie these in, I might pull them in pretty good. We're just going to do it. I don't mind it sticking out a little. Here's what we're going to do. I am going to make sure I got a little needle here. We are going to not do wax thread, we're going to do this ribbon. It may be harder, we're going to do the ribbon. Let's see. I want to hold these together with ribbon, and then I want to tie the ribbon off on the outside and I haven't tried this before. I'm just expecting it to work. I'm glad that these little needles have a gigantic eye on them so that maybe I can thread the ribbon through the eye. If we can look at that. Look at that. That's what I wanted. We're going to do number one first, I actually want to come from the outside in the center hole first, and then I want to end out the outside. Normally we begin in the inside middle. But let's see how much of this we're going to actually need. I'm just going to pull that. I'm going to let this be a straggly out here and now I'm going to go into our signature. I'm going to go in that center hole, and I'm just going to force the ribbon through and I might not want to come through because it is a lot of ribbon there, but we're going to make it. I need a pair of pliers to help me. Ooh. There we go. Did it. And there's of course, like a nod or something here. All right. Just to force it, do the best we can. And then if we've got some extra fuzz because this ribbon fuzeut the fuzz off. I want to make sure I got plenty left over here. I don't want to lose my little tail. Really to make sure I don't lose my tail, I could probably clip it and make sure I keep enough tail without accidentally losing it. Then we're going to go through The last hole and the grommet. You're just going to have to work it. It might be easier to work it sheet by sheet. That's going to be what our center looks like. Now this next one is going to be hard. We're going back through that hole just as if we had a little thin piece of, but I want to go through that hole and not snag the ribbon. I don't know if that's possible, but we're going to try. Back through the grommet, back through the hole, not going to defeat me here. All right. Through the paper top hole. Through the get. This is the last hole that we have to go. We're about to tie it off. A thinner ribbon would definitely be easier, but it wouldn't be as for what I want. There we go. Now we've got these two in there. We've got this one. I'm just pulling it taught, make sure I don't have any poking out weirdly. Then I'm going to go underneath the loop that I've already got there to give myself a little bit of stability there and now probably going to do that. This one on this side of this loop so that they're not both on the same side of the loop. And I'm going to tie that off, and then we're going to make a nice pretty bow out of that when we're done, but you might double k that because that one is not going to keep. Then that ribbon is going to be a bow or we can just leave it hanging out and now we're going to sew the second one in. And I can see that it's definitely going to hang out some, but it's mostly on the back side, the way I've done that. I could cut the paper shorter. At this point, I could just go tear all of these smaller with my little rip ruler or I could just leave it because it fits out there. But let's sew in our second one of these, and then we can see what we really want to do there. Might just leave it. I plan on leaving it. That bugs you, you can see what you're going to come across. That's why I do some of this for you guys like this because then you can see what I've come across and you can go, a ha. Now I know that's something that's going to come up. Let's thread the ribbon. You can you don't have to use ribbon, but if you're going to do that big gram hole, Big ribbon is nice, and I'm just going to keep all that. Let's see. Coming from the outside, we just want to move all this over and come in beside it. I'm trying not to basically snag that ribbon. I'm coming in right there beside it, and then we're going to go through the center hole and do the same thing on this one. I'm going to make sure that they are in order to make sure because our holes will be in different places if they're not in order. I allow a quarter of an inch extra, but all this paper is different sizes. You might allow a half inch extra if you really want to make sure that you're going to have plenty overhang. I didn't really allow extra. I need these to be out of the way. I'm just going to twist them and maybe snag them out of the way here. Maybe the back side, and then I don't have to worry about that piece. This piece needs to be about that same length though. It's just the back side. There we go. I want to pull that through or I've got maybe about that length. That was a piece that had a seam on it I didn't see. Let's go with this. There's a seam at the end. I think that's better sown. I'm just trying to get it about the same length as the one that we've got here. So back through the whole and I'm trying not to catch any of the ribbons that I've already got coming out of here. I know that's a lot of ribbons there. Just trying to be careful as I go. Try not to lose the one that we're going to be tying off later. As I'm pulling this through. I don't want to lose that length there. Not so tight that we wrinkle our book. Then through the last hole, tied off. Once you got the second one in, we are going to just do the exact same that we did with the first one, but the first one was on itself, and we're going to tie the second one on itself. Now I'm going to take this bottom ribbon here. And loop around to the back side of that first ribbon like I did that first one so that I can tie these off and I'm going to take this one and loop under the ribbon that that hole I just created so that they're on opposite sides to tie it off. Make sure it's tight. Make sure there's no gaps. Make sure there's no gaps where we don't want them and then tie that one off. Now we have two of these. Make sure I didn't just make that too tight. No. I can even tie it in this ribbon here. Underneath it. There we go, Let's do that. Let's just tie it underneath it. I want the same length. Then you won't even know that that's under there because it'll look like part of those bows. Yeah, there we go. Then we can just tie it off to close it as we're working in it, we have that extra little piece over there. I like that. There we go. Just got to get creative with some of these. Think about logically. On what you're going to have to do to maybe do the cover. My cover mostly fits in with these pages, except I'm about a half inch short on this side, so I've got two choices there, I can leave it and not care about it, which one I'm going to do. Second choice is I could cut those with my rip role, I could just rip a half inch off. But I actually like it like that. I like the handmade quality, and I could have made the cover about a half inch bigger. Just figure like the length of the cover and I added about a quarter of an inch, so maybe the length of the cover and add an inch and you should be good. But some of this is just playing and figuring out as you go. I hope you enjoy playing with maybe a gromet as you're outside edges with some ribbons coming out to be the binding for your piece. Now we are ready. These are sewn in. Got little threads I can cut away because I'm using silk and that silk just poles as you're using it. Now I'm ready to paint and use this, however, like. Then as you get to the part where you get to the next piece, you just see the grommets there. Super cool. It's a fun little binding technique that I thought maybe you would enjoy. I can't wait to see if you do anything with this one, and I'll see you guys back in class. 13. Final Thoughts: As we wrap up our art journal workshop, I hope you feel empowered to continue exploring the boundless possibilities of journal making. The skills you've learned here from the delicate art of fabric color creation to the thoughtful assembly of paper types can serve as a foundation for endless artistic projects. Remember, each journal you create is a reflection of your journey and your creativity. Keep experimenting with materials and techniques, and don't hesitate to revisit lessons to refine your craft. Thank you for joining me in this creative adventure, and I look forward to seeing how your art journals evolve.