Don't Mind the Arrow

Bookmark

I love bookmarks - buying them, making them, receiving them in swaps. And then I promptly misplace them or have them all occupied in books I'm partway through, and end up using receipts to mark my place in books. That doesn't stop me from making more bookmarks, though, especially because I'm going to be doing some serious plane reading soon. 

With my most recent obsession - repurposing old books into sketchbooks - I've got a lot of book "innards" laying around. I did some art with a few of the pages that I haven't managed to post here yet, but it's similar to the concept of this bookmark.

I drew the design in ink, and then colored it with my Prismacolor pencils. Then I coated it with Mod Podge (thus, the sheen in the photo) and glued it to a cardstock bookmark. I'll spray it with sealant to finish it, but today it's windy outside and threatening rain.

Day 7, Under the Wire

My project today is to-be-continued. Now that I've made a few books (and now that it's a week away from our trip), I felt ready to tackle my sketch journal for Germany. I had already cut, folded and pressed the signatures for it, so the first order of business today was punching the holes:

After that, I stitched it together using a different method than I've used for my previous books (the tutorial I was following can be found by following this link). I somehow forgot to take a picture of it after I'd stitched it up, but got one of the next stage of the process - gluing fabric to the spine.

Once that had dried, I added the endpapers (the design of which will remain a mystery till the next round of pictures) and glued the fabric to the cover.

And that's where it stands as of now. Tomorrow I'll glue the endpapers down (hopefully without any wrinkling, for once) and it'll be done. I'm so looking forward to using this!

Handmade Travel Guide

When Morgan and I found out we would be going to Germany, I wanted to get a Moleskine City Book for Munich. I used one of them when I went to Chicago and really liked the way it had helpful things like a map and transit information, and then space for you to write in your own places to see or reflections on your experiences. Unfortunately, the Munich guide was apparently published a couple of years ago and was really hard to find - it wasn't being stocked anywhere and places would special order it, but I decided to just go about it in a different way.

I mean, it's a notebook, right? I could do that. So I grabbed one of the notebooks I had around here and proceeded to start turning it into my own version of a city book.

        

The cover and a transit map. I liked the idea of having a large map of the trains right in the front of the book. After that, I put in a map of the tram system that goes further out from the city. It's too large to be glued in as-is, so I folded it and glued the bottom corner in and it just folds out from there.

        

Morgan printed out another map that I've folded up but not put in yet. After that, I have some pages for an overview and planning - our flight information and general lists of things we're interested in seeing. Then, I have pages for each date. I wrote in our hotel information on the days we check in, and noted stuff that happens on a specific day, like a festival commemorating Munich's founding.

Since we're also going to be staying in 3 different places, I set aside sections to mimic the sections in Moleskine's city books for each of them - pages with room to write about restaurants, shopping and attractions. 

This is a map of the small town where we'll be spending a week at the beginning of its section. In the back of the book, I also added a glossary of food terms I found. I figured it's good to be able to decipher what you're eating.

I'm really pleased with it so far, but I'm not completely finished yet - a lot of what is left to do is the fun part though - filling it in with the things we want to do and places we want to go!

Days 4 and 5

I'm a little behind in posting my 30 Days of Creativity projects here, although I'm not behind in actually making them. Day 4 I took a photo while Morgan and I were out at the Denver Chalk Art Festival.

For Day 5, I colored in a drawing I'd started on the same day. 

I also used it as another test of the color selection I'd put into my travel case. I decided to go ahead and fill it out to capacity - 48 pencils. I don't think I'll really feel like I'm missing anything now. After completing this drawing, I also decided to add some of the brown paper into my Germany journal. Yesterday I cut and folded the signatures for that, and hopefully I'll sew them together tonight.

However, that's not my day 6 project. I'll be posting about that in a separate post, up in a little while.

Sushi Den

Today's 30 Days of Creativity project is sort of a two-fer. The first part is another one I started before but completed today. I did a quick pen sketch on Wednesday night when Morgan and I went to Sushi Den. I usually avoid drawing any people in my pictures because they are definitely the weak link for me, but drawings can be pretty static without them. I've decided to practice adding people even if I'm not that happy with them at first. Nothing gets better without practice, right?

      

I got a travel case for my pencils today, and started trying to stock it. It's harder than I thought to decide which colors to take. I made preliminary choices and then used only those pencils to color the Sushi Den drawing. I can already tell there are some changes I'll want to make - luckily I still have room for maybe 10 more pencils in the case!

This is the first drawing I've done in my "All Summer in a Day" sketchbook, too. I really like the effect of the pencils on the brown paper - I'll be adding in some of this paper to my Germany sketchbook.

Coloring Book Pages

Today's project was for a swap I'm in on Swap-Bot. We had to each draw 5 coloring book pages for our partners. It was a little challenging thinking of things that would translate well to line drawings and also be at least moderately interesting to color.

My drawings were an underwater scene, a hot air balloon, downtown Denver, flowers, and a candy display.

 

If you're intersted in coloring any of them, click on any of the images, and I think it should pop up in another window and be printable at the intended size (5 x 7). It was a fun  project, but definitely not as easy as it seemed it might be.

30 Days of Creativity Kickoff

Here we are, June 1, and I'm starting a new daily project. We'll see if I can make it past the first two weeks. In any event, I've got my first day's contribution done. I started it a few days ago because handbound books take more than a day to complete, but I finished it today so I'm counting it.

I got the book at a thrift store (at the same time I got my corduroy laptop bag that I embellished). The title, All on a Summer's Day, is what drew me to it. Since I'm still practicing my bookbinding skills, its somewhat beat up exterior was perfect - I didn't have to be too afraid to mess it up. It was a discarded library book, so I used some green paper wrapped around the bottom section to cover up the ugly library sticker on the spine and add some visual interest to the cover.

Inside, I used scrapbooking paper for the endpapers and recycled brown paper for the signatures. I'm thinking I'll just use this one myself and see how it holds up. I'm getting to the point where I want to start working on the book I'm planning to take to Germany, and I want to make sure I'm not doing anything that will mean the book won't last through the experience.