Inaugural Craft Night!

We had a thing, a couple of friends and I, to do arts and such. One friend made this beauty to grace her new apartment. One friend announced that her art project for the night was the art of reading: she had too many pages of Infinite Jest to finish before book club.

I practiced my long known craft of multitasking, working on two separate projects. However, I only applied my art of never finishing projects to one as of yet. The other managed to escape my finer skills and actually managed to get completed in a timely manner.  I've even since used it, which is more than can be said for my poor Cahier, which languishes.

I discovered a need for a planner of sorts after I began my classes -- unfortunately, also after the largest craft fair in Chicago, where beautiful and well-made journals were in abundance. So, with the hoarding powers invested in me, I pulled together one of my own.

It's made from lined paper salvaged from old class notebooks, a photograph clipped from a National Geographic article on Pushkin, a ribbon saved from gods know where, the thread I use to mend jeans, and two sheets of paper from a printing company in Boulder that went out of business many decades ago. Yes, I come from a family of hobby hoarders.


The process was easy enough, though inevitably it took several days due to the use of several different types of glue. Oh, I also bought rubber cement for this and my other craft night project.  So, total cost of the planner? $2.99, and the glue will continue to be a supply in the future. Not too shabby.


This was really all that got finished by the end of Wednesday's craft night. Paper all cut out, the cover sheets being glued together, the cover illustration chosen.  Nothing quite says motivation and resilience than stylishly forging your way through the snowy unforgiving Chicago Russian winter.


I bound the spine with a run through the sewing machine, after first verifying that the tight stitches and thick threads wouldn't stress the flimsy notebook stock.  But all was well.


Due to my difficulties with paper books and the cahier, I had some experience on situations to avoid this time around.  I attached the cover image separately and kept it from overlapping the problematic spine bend, and I made sure I had wide enough paper scraps to create one signature I could sew down the middle, rather than short scraps which needed to be bound. Conveniently enough, the standard size of the notebook paper was ideal for the planner size I had in mind. Inconveniently enough, I managed to miss sewing down that ribbon entirely. Good thing I glued it down in case of such an event.


And here's the final product, already filled in as of yesterday and already with a few things crossed off as of today!