A Month of Bookbinding

After spending more than a year buried in quilting projects I decided to switch gears and catch up on a pile of unfinished bookbinding projects.

These are pocket size notebooks with hand painted canvas covers and several different types of  papers for pages.

And a few mini notebooks with painted canvas covers.
 

 A pile of mini long stitch leather books.

I spent some time learning how to do a French Link bookbinding stitch in different sizes using some heavy drawing paper.

And made a couple map paper junk books just for the fun of it, also with painted canvas covers.

Finally I had a couple more leather projects that were a little larger to finish and I wanted to do something different for the binding so I tried this neat criss-cross stitch. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, I just had to map it out on paper and in my head before I started.

Thanks for reading.

Aileen

New Year, Old Projects

I'm still trying to get back to the projects I was working on before Christmas. This week I finally got all the Christmas decorations taken down, packed up and put away. At the beginning of every year I go through a process of writing a personal summary of the previous year and setting goals and milestones for the coming year. This often takes several days. I have been a journalist for decades.  I started journaling late in my 20's and each year since, I have strengthened that habit with more frequent and detailed writings, so at this point I am keeping a daily and several specific topic personal journals. As a result, a year end summary is not as simple as writing a couple sentences. It takes longer. 

So I still haven't done any crafts in the past two weeks to speak of. I did sit and free crochet this little pouch for a mini journal while watching tv. It's a prototype and I need to adjust the pattern some. The little flap is sort of wonky. But I added a bone button and its works the way I wanted it to. 

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen 

Post Christmas Regroup

Whew, the rush to get too many things done before Christmas is over. Now it's time to access the damage to my craft room and what is still on 'The List' to finish or forget. But my fingers have been very busy and this is what I've done in the past two weeks. 

These are what I call mini memento journals. They are the same size and design as the other mini journals I've been making recently but they have some preprinted pages inside with vintage family photos. 

I carefully formatted a file with these little photos in a grid based on the cut page size for these journals . That was the hard part. Printing out the pages and putting together the journal was easy after that. These were all bound with a cross-stitch pattern and the paper was tea stained and torn to give it a soft aged look.

I also made a couple more mini journals and some little journals that are not as tiny as the mini's.

These Mini's (above) are 2" x 2" but the Little's (below) are 3.5" x 3".  These were all bound with a simple long-stitch because they have more than 3 signatures each.

After finishing the journals I made a couple more earth power bead strands. There are 36 different gemstone beads in each strand with pyrite, quartz and amazonite anchoring the ends. I also put the beads on in alphabetical order beginning with Aventurine and ending with Unakite.

There are still a couple unfinished projects on the work table that I do plan to finish over the holidays. Then I have to back up to whatever I was into back in September before the "holidays" started directing my efforts.  

Thanks for reading. Have a Happy New Year!
Aileen