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!

Le Cahier Français

Capital letters necessary.  Not only did I start this project a whole week ago, but it used up some of my supplies in ways I was not especially excited about:

Oh yes, this notebook broke three needles. With the central one, the tip just snapped right off. Bonus: I now have a quilling tool.

And that's because this spine is the thickest, sturdiest construction I've ever seen, courtesy of Japanese stab binding.  The interior is notebook pages, which means the spine will last longer than the pages it's holding.

It will probably also last longer than the front cover, which has been fighting against the very necessary bend in the spine this whole time. The black spine on the front cover was necessitated by misaligned holes the first time through, requiring a new layer.  Unfortunately, the thicker paper and the edge it created close to the fold are pretty unwieldy.

The holes I created in the textblock took forever, despite using a very sturdy Denim sewing machine needle. So, inevitably, I didn't widen the holes out enough to make it easy to push the thread through.  Especially since this binding requires each hole to be passed through three times with a needle loaded with embroidery floss. Is it any wonder I lost three needles to this process?

I also had to tie on another length of thread near the end, but it's not noticeable because I knotted it on the inside of the back cover, and poked the ends in to the spine. However unwieldy the process, it certainly created a lovely spine. Pity about the buckling cover papers.

Currently, I am letting the glue come unfixed because A. I need to figure out a better solution for these stress points, and B. I'm sick of re-gluing it.

The binding thread's ends pull through to this knot, and then I pulled the thread through to the spine, snipped it, and poked the ends back in.  I'd show you a picture, but they are purposefully invisible.

As a vocabulary/grammar notebook, hopefully it will do well.  I suspect it will only suffice, but that has as much to do with my language-learning habits as the wonky cover/spine combination.

Project materials: Cereal box paperboard, magazine page, black medium-weight paper, unused pages from an old notebook, embroidery floss, sewing needles, sewing machine needles, binder clips, needle nose pliers. Total cost = $0

I also did some other, more chore-ly things, like mending these rag towels so they'd stop fraying themselves into oblivion.  Oh, my beautiful Husqvarna, I promise we'll get to do more fun things soon.