One Shots

So I was on YouTube watching som eThread Bangers episodes and I was thinking that those very same stencil design ideas could be applied to the covers of notebooks. I did a whoel art series a few years ago (okay so more like 9 years ago) of spray pained backgrounds, stencils and what not on paper, so I KNEW that the ideas in the threadbangers video would work on paper. SO I decided to take what I knew and apply it to a few covers of jotters and make a limited edition series of jotters. Here are the first few- I made 17 total, metallic spray paint, red and black and gray. I pulled a tribal wing flash design off the net and adapted it, a diagram of a heart and adapted that too, through painted up the back grounds, layers of paint, and gessoed covers, and finally embellishing with some snazzy stitching here are my results:






I decided to test the limits of my sewing machine too, I've added several extra pages- I went from 48 to 60! Yikes! I also went high end with the paper, some have 24lb 25% cotton and some have 100% cotton paper and some have hand stitchin. I'll have a few up on eBay later today and some on etsy too.

The Finishing touches

To make your coffee bag jotter can be finished easily now that you've prepared and cleaned your bag. Start by lightly ironing the mylar, use a very light setting on you iron and cover the mylar with paper to protect your iron.

Too hot and you mylar bag will curl. Be careful.

I like to stitch down the flap with a zig zag stitch but you could use any decorative or straight stitch- or not stitch it at all.

Here you can see where I've stitched down the flap. Now you want to trim all the edges and make your piece of mylar square- it's easier to work with this way.


Flip the bag over and measure out the size of your notebook with a sharpie. I'm making a small pocket sized notebook here, so I've measured 5.5 inches down from the top. Trim the mylar to the right size.
Measure the size of your front cover plus 1/4 of an inch- so for my notebook I've measure 3.75 inches in and 'scored" a line with a pencil. Measure the same for your back cover and score again with you r pencil. Fold along the back cover score and fold any remaining mylar to create a flap.
After you've created your flap cut an angle to allow for creating a pocket.
After you've folded and cut your flap stitch the flap down again.
Stack the cover with 15 sheets of paper and use binder clips to hold it in place. You should just be able to see the score mark you made originally.


If you use a sewing machine stitch down that score mark using a wide straight stitch. If you don't have a sewing machine you can punch 15 holes and stitch through them to make your notebook.

Fold along the stitches press hard, use a bone folder to really crease the fold.


Hold the covers tight to the paper and gently hit the spine with a hammer, sharp hits but not pounding hits.
Line a ruler up witht eh back cover and trim away the excess uneven paper.


Here's the finished book. If you don't like how the cover sits, run your iron over it. If the mylar is too flimsy feeling you can raise the temp of the iron and laminate the cover to the first page.

Prepare a Coffee bag for making a Jotter

Get one used mylar coffee bag.

Flatten it. Trim the bottom of the bag along the seam, just above it. You want as much usable mylar as possible to make your notebook.

After flattening and trimming find the air lock. On some bags it’s clearly visible and other’s it’s harder to find. I noticed that starbucks and Pete’s hide theirs in their logos. Keeping with the theme of keeping as much usable mylar as possible trim straight up from the bottom along one side of the airlock and them up the other side, you’ll be left with a strip of mylar about 1 inch wide with the airlock in it. Discard it.


Use a damp sponge wipe down the mylar. Then use a spray cleaner to continue to clean it. It may take several cleanings to get it clean. Don’t leave any of the coffee oils on the mylar as it will stain the paper when stitched in.

After this you can cut and stitch the mylar just like you would paper or fabric. I like to stitch down the seam along the back of the bag and then sew the jotter as if I was using cardstock.

changes

So I’ve taken more time off from binding than I had expected. I needed some time to relax, think about the direction of my website, what I wanted for my website, what I wanted with my art, and realistically look at what and where I was willing to go with it.

I’m really good at retail. I do a great job with it, but that doesn’t meant hat I want to spend all my free time selling journals and supplies that I have nothing to do with other than to order them. I have less free time now than ever and I don’t want to spend that time dealing with retail issues while I’m at home. While I want to create a great website with all those fine journals that I love; I don’t want to spend time ordering, filling orders etc. I see a huge opportunity out there for someone who has the time and energy to create a website fulfilling those needs for people. I think also I was going into it for the wrong reasons- I saw it as a way out of the world of retail hell and it was simply a different level of that hell for me. I think that if I were in a different place financially I would be able to make it work. I just wasn’t able to take out another loan and take a chance that it was going to pay off or not. That being said, when I am financially bale to make this work, I’ll be on top of it in a heartbeat.

So, what I will be doing is focusing on the last of the stock that I have, keeping a few hard to find journaling items- the pencil sharpeners, pencils etc… The main focus is now for me to concentrate on my bookbinding. I’ll have three areas of that: the leather premium journals, the recycled premium journals and the 100% recycled journals. Obviously the 3 lines are going to appeal to different people but I like all of them and that’s what I’m interested in making, so that’s where I’m going to go.

So over the next 2 weeks I’m going to focus on revamping the website, photographing some books, and resetting the crappy paypal shopping cart system. So I’ll set myself up with a schedule and then work on things according to that. I’ve already ripped down the links to moleskine, ciak, and all the other stuff I wanted to carry but didn’t. So We’ll see how things look and go. Hopefully it will be back to basics and better.

Sewing Cradle

So My brother has 3 sewing cradles made. 1 will go on my etsy account, one on his and one is currently up on eBay right now. You can see it here He did a great job with them and all the pictures I've seen look fantastic.

Another interesting item that I had my brother and father recreate/make for me is my version of the sewing cradle. For ages I worked with a cardboard cradle that I made after the pictures I saw on Volcano arts. It worked great. Then I decided I wanted something a little more stiff and permanent, so I designed and tried to make one out of wood, well my efforts with wood were crude at best but served to make a functional but ugly sewing cradle.

So when I went to Maine I took wit me my sewing cradle. Explained my original concept to my brother who said "Oh Yeah we can do that you just use this tool. What do you mean you tried to use the router to do that?" At which point my father said "Your lucky you didn't hurt yourself."

The result is a fantastic light weight 100% pine handmade sewing cradle. I put my nerw cradle through it's paces yesterday with the punching of 8 hedgehog blocks, and it ruled. IT sat flat on my table top and was stiff, allowing me to pucnh through more signatures at once than my old cradle. I'll post some pictures of it tonight.

Recycled insides

This is what the inside of all the recycled notebooks looks like, on some of the larger books the "team member favorites" is along the top or bottom of the page, but essentially this is what they look like.

Recycled Fleshy Ads

I call these the fleshy ads. They come form some of the same advertising posters are the other jotters, the only difference is that some of these have flesh tones and not necessarily words. Some do and others don't. I ove the variability of some of the advertising posters. I also like how durable the paper is. It's made to withstand some abuse in the stores so it's very tough. I haven't had to put one to the test yet but I'm willing to bet that they will outlast some of the other paper covers.

These like the other recycled jotters come in a set of 3. Each notebook has 40 pages of neehan paper, printed on every other papge with light green bands and the words "team member's favorites." They are individually machine stitched and hand trimmed.

They are available on etsy here.

Recycled AdWords Jotters

These jotters are 98% recycled. These covers are from advertising posters that hang inside a store. The paper is a very heavy stiff cardstock, probably 110lb printed on and then laminated on each side with a thin coat of vinyl. This makes the covers stiff and strong.

I then stack 10 sheets of 24lb recycled paper, neehan paper, of white and speckled in color a very pale tan. A good sturdy paper, that has been printed on in green ink to have a light band of green and some text and a logo. I was able to trim the logo off but the text remains, it says "Team Member Favorites."

This set of Jotters have the words from the ads as the covers. As such this can never be reproduced. Each one is individual. I think that the letters make interesting and abstract images. I made a huge stack of these for myself. I also made a lot of these for etsy. You can find them here on my etsy page!

These are mostly called for

I had a request for Jotters in a variety of colors. Canson makes their mein-teintes paper in 8.5x11in size, perfect for making jotters. On my way home on Friday I stopped at Charette and bought up a variety of colors, yellows and blues. They have a lot of great colors and I looked online and in some catalogs they carry a mixed color pack that I may have to pick up some time.

I had gone to my local crafts store and bought a package of "card stock" paper for scrap booking. I'm not sure whats going on out there in the scrap booking world but this paper was not cardstock, it was slightly heavy than regular paper, it was probably a 65lb paper rather than a 90lb paper I usually associate with cardstock. It's more cover weight paper for reports. Well it's just this side of useless for my needs. So it will end up as end sheets for hedgehogs and perhaps the pages of some hedgies.

Anyway, rant over, the canson paper was perfect. A nice texture and weight for my covers. I stacked Southworth linen textured 25% cotton, 24lb paper in ivory color wiht the canson and stitched it with the ecru and white thread combination. I dare say the off white thread looks good with all colors of paper, kind of the way Khaki pants look good with most colors of shirts.





I forgot to add these are also small cahier sized- 3.5x5.5 inches, and no pocket in the back.

For the Magpies

These little jotters are for the magpies out there!

For these I used acid free scrapbooking paper, in a nice textured variety that was too thin to be used as a cover on it's own so I laminated it to a stiff black cardstock. I let the covers dry for a few days under weights and then stacked the covers with ivory granite Southworth paper. I ran the stack through my sewing machine. I used heavy quilting cotton poly blend thread in ecru and white thread inside.

Each stack made 2 notebooks.

After pulling them off the sewing machine I folded the pages and cover, and then trimmed the fore- edges and head and tail. It was quite a process. Each stack made 2 books. These took a little extra work in comparison to the other jotters I make but I think they turned out quite well. So Shiney and pretty.

They each have 60 pages and are 3.5X5.5 inches. I didn't round my corners.


The green jotter above is on eBay here.



The above JOtter and the one below are on etsy here.

Strathmore 500 series Paper

So I dipped into my Strathmore 500 series paper stash and ripped down several sheets into pages for these covers. One is on eBay and one is on etsy. I stu with simple sewing patterns and I think they turned out well.



This little journal is 124 pages of Strathmore 500 series charcoal paper. Simple linking long stitch in black Irish linen. It's on etsy here!

This also is Strathmore 500 series paper, 148 pages. It's a alternating long stitch in natural unbleached Irish linen. It's on eBay here!