The Dual Pamphlet Book – how to and a few more ideas

OK so I realized that the photos from Friday were not great and the whole process might be a little confusing. I wanted to make another so I did and tried to take some better photos. In the process I had a few ideas that I may try, which I think will make the book even more interesting.

You will need two folios of six sheets each, folded in half and nested. I made mine 4 x 6 inches then trimmed so the inner pages did not extend past 4 inches. Ideally you will have a long sheet of cardstock weight paper that is just a bit over the height (maybe 6 1/2 inches) and 4 1/2 x the width of your book. Three or four times the width is workable. We don’t all have huge sheets of paper or card hanging about. My sheet was just about 16 inches wide, and I made it work!

Folding the cover.

Fold the cover in half, then fold one side back, leaving 3/4 inch of the cover from the original fold. Fold the other cover side to match.

Open the cover and lay it out with the little pleat upward and the front of the cover face down on the desk. Add your two folios on either side like so:

Mine were cut from paper on a roll so they are still a bit round-y looking!

Grab the topmost halves and pull them up so they touch and are either side of the pleat and clamp them together like so. The covers are face-to-face, hanging down, and the inner halves of both folios sandwich the pleat.

Lay the structure down, with the outer halves of the folios and the face-to-face covers at the bottom, and just the inner halves of the folios sandwiching the pleat to the top. On something that will protect your desk (like a cork tile or self healing mat) punch your five holes for a 5-hole pamphlet stitch. Two holes, about 1/2 inch from the top and from the bottom, one in the middle, and one either side, evenly spaced like below. Does not have to be perfect!

Sew the 5-hole pamphlet stitch with waxed linen thread. Now fold the folios together with the covers around them. The pleat will be dead centre of the book.

As you can see, the sewing is all inside the book, no threads show on the outside!

Now, if you had paper that was a good 4 1/2 to 5 times the width of your book, you would perhaps have to trim. Mine was just about 4 times the width. I folded the extra in and stuck it to the inside of the cover.

Done. I think if the pleat in the middle were wider it might make a pocket. It may solve the problem of needing a very very wide strip for the cover if you used two strips, not joined in the middle, then stuck the top and bottom edges to make a pocket that way!

Likewise, you could use heavier cardstock and create pockets from the edge I folded over and stuck. I was using decent, but not heavy weight pained paper for my cover.

I think this is a really lovely way to easily bind a book with more folios/pages inside and more stability that a traditional pamphlet stitch. I just think it has a lot of potential and hope you give it a go!

My MIL knows what I like!

I came back with a bunch of old stuff my MIL was clearing out of her sewing and craft space. She knows I like old paper and I had mentioned that I was using lace in a few projects. Well. Little did I expect!

The lace at the far left is actually scraps from my wedding dress, which she made. I also snagged a few bits of embroidery cotton – I was missing purples in the mix I bought from Amazon a while back for my Kawandi so yippee!

She gave me some old doilies (check the price!)

and some paper with seeds on it. Both are pretty old. Also a pack of wrapping paper – many colours, five HUGE sheets in each. No idea where she got it originally

It’s a bit translucent, like heavy tissue paper. I think it’ll be really useful! Lastly she passed on some vintage photo frames. I must have expressed interest in them at some point and she remembered.

Not sure what I will do with them but they are very cool.

So while I came home with quite a lot of stuff, I really didn’t spend a lot (zero on all this) so it was really just the weight in the suitcases. Tomorrow I do have some things I bought, but they were ALSO on sale and things that (so far as I know) are not available here.

It is very unlike me to do “haul” videos but this is me taking a breather from arty posts while I recover from a busy couple of weeks, clean the whole house, and do too many Drs. appointments in one week, all while jet lagged. Plus Thanksgiving and a bird to be prepared.

Yiles.

December Journal done – last one for 2023

Despite a rocky start, my attempt to acquire the daily journaling (or morning journaling, if you prefer) habit has been a success. I now feel how I would miss it if I was not doing it, and recognize the pull of it when I first sit down at my desk. That’s a result for sure.

I picked the paper for the December journal, as I mentioned ysterday, because I worried making in in time after we get back from our trip might be a struggle.

I did amp up the colour a bit. But again the screen image is not exactly like the printed image. Anyway. My process is to print the cover image on my 210 gsm coated cardstock, then stick that to my stash of thick linen texture white cardstock to make the cover. I’ll fold over the sides and add a bit of decorative washi tape to the inside.

That makes a nice weight cover without the need to use up all my cereal-box card. Then I had to go in search of a letter sticker sheet. Ha. dEcEmbEr. I looked thru my stash and I struggled to find sheets with TWO Es let alone THREE. Look at this:

I mean come ON! I had multiple sheets, clearly from more than one pack of these, with zero lower case e’s. What’s a girl to do?

OK so a few points:

1. the inside of this one has the brown recycled packaging paper. 2024, I think I may opt for plain white paper. It’s more archival. We’ll see.
2. this one has just the month name on the cover. Next year I plan to add the year on the cover as well.
3. the white linen card + printed paper works very well, weight-wise. It’s sturdy and it will stand up to daily use, at least for the month.

I am pretty happy with this decision, and like the idea of using my own papers to cover the journals, not just random, unused gel prints. I think the white paper will be an adjustment (golly it is really WHITE!) but I think it will be OK once I get used to it.

My next thing to decide is what to do while I am away. I am not really one for blogging from the road, so it may be a case of a few days of old favourites coming back, or I may add some digital downloads, calendars and the like, so people who are looking for 2024 ones (in addition to the ones already shared here) can use them for making their new planners and/or gifts. I’ll think on it – I will have to make those things so yeah, that might be a bit of a struggle.

{sigh} more decisions…

Just a check in….

Well, after (literally) years of avoiding Covid, we have all been hit hard by it. The Hubster, me, Dear Son, all three fell like dominoes in rapid succession. We are a few days in, still testing positive and feeling a little bit better but by no means good.

Bear with me – I’ll be back when I’m up to it. Till then, I will just wish you all the very best for 2023. Health, happiness, prosperity and peace to you all.

Stress relief that satisfies the Gelli Arts challenge…

I am trying to sneak in a tiny bit of arty play in between bouts of tidying. This ended up taking longer than I hoped, because the combo of the paint I wanted to use and the gel plate I needed did not play well together. This one is for G: Geometric.

I was very inspired by the sample shared from artwithmollie, a Spirograph sort of piece enhanced with coloured pencils. I really want to do a piece following her instructions, but didn’t think I had the time. Yeah. Right. I headed off in a similar vein, looking at patterns of overlapping circles in a grid. I found a couple I liked and printed them.

I thought if I printed the grid I could use it under some not-too-thick paper ti guide the placement of the circles. What you can see above is my crazy DIY on the fly temporary lightbox. The blocks support a piece of glass (from the original Creative Memories circle cutter!) and I slip my phone with the flashlight on unto the gap to illuminate the image. I can’t both use my phone for that AND take a photo so use your imagination!

You can see it works perfectly, and I don’t know why I didn’t just carry on with this first effort.No, I thought I could do BETTER. Queue about 2 hours of trying and failing to achieve my vision. First I wanted a more sheer version that would show the overlapping areas getting darker as I overprinted them

but the dang Distress Inks just beaded up and I wasn’t keen. So I thought maybe adding some pattern would work. And that was not great either. But in the end I did manage a few I didn’t hate. One of them I ended up doing the neurographic corner-rounding on, which had been kinda my original idea. Sorry to say this is not the greatest photo but you get the idea.

It’s hard to see all the bubble wrap texture in the circles but it is there. And that worked well enough so I went ahead to see what the neuro-lines would look like on the DI sample. And I liked that too.

I think I might play with this a bit more when I have more time – honestly doing the pen work, as always is a very restful process.

Next week will be hell. I might do a couple of days worth of posts over the weekend, see if I can catch up on the #ABCPrintingChallenge #GelliArts list, then it will be all about the windows. Ugh. Excited for it to be over!

Edited to add: Sadly, the Queen has died. As the longest serving monarch it really is the end of an era. It will be hard to get used to saying King Charles instead of Queen Elizabeth, unlike how easy it was to get used to President Biden!

My first Neurographic art finished

Well that was bags of fun. I mentioned watching a video by Keren Tamir about Neurographic art, and after watching it had to have a go. She explains a complex process and theory pretty well in a lot fewer words and in a lot less time than the other people who popped up – and in English, which for me is a big help. Just looking at images on Google shows the huge possibilities of the work. While I am not 100% into the whole therapy part, I will say that much like Zentangling, the meditative aspect appeals. The big difference is that with Zentangling I always felt more pressure for the work to look good at the end. And I am not sure if the neurographic process just looks better no matter how you do it or if I am better at it, but I don’t get that sense of disappointment at the end.

I looked at the final piece from yesterday and as the white paint pens were on my desk from the AJ page, I decided I’d tart it up. To begin with, it was looking a whole lot like what my Mom taught me to do as a child in the 60s – scribble drawings. Colouring books were expensive, but my brother and I could cover plain white paper with black scribbles and colour in the loops all day long for pennies.

I did a big dot on each nexus then used a variety of pens to vary the dot size and ended up with:

Closer:

Also quite a meditative process! I did a second one and used only my Stabilo All pencil to colour in the loops in shades of grey.

Really liked that on a lot. I ended up using some copper acrylic ink and a dotting tool (from my darling daughter’s nail art supply) for something a bit different:

That one looks very cool as the light catches it. So I had a bit of an idea as a way to test out a few more extra additions that may or may not result in something use-able. More on that tomorrow. But I can see me playing with this for a while as it is very relaxing and quite focused. Plus it uses only a few supplies at the beginning so maybe easier that knitting if I end up having a 4-day IVIG session in a few weeks.

Death’s Dinner Party ATCs

I wonder how many will see these ATCs and immediately go back to the scene in the movie….A few? A lot? I’ll link it here so everyone gets the joke:

Still makes me laugh. But honestly it was a hard slog to get here. My desk, as I tried and discarded a number of possible ATCs – one I was keen to do was a Ken Brown Stamps image of a lady riding an alligator, with the stamped words This isn’t my first rodeo. But my eyes ain’t great anymore and the fine details were hard to get right with Copics. So I shifted:

As soon as I coloured those skeleton hands it just brought the movie scene to mind so clearly I had to follow thru. Then I had to sort out what to do about the “salmon mousse” while I have a lot of food related stamps but that is pretty specific. I ended up finding a cookbook image of salmon mousse sitting on a plate (easy to cut out) and the colour was perfect. I think it all came together pretty well.

I made four. Now I have to decide where to trade them. I’ve been hesitant to put stuff on the more USA based groups – it’s a trade off, because there is a much wider pool of people to trade with and a better chance you will find some cool ATCs because of that, but damn if the postage to the USA isn’t killing me! Yeeks. My fault for adding all the extras but…

So this is like the tird set where all the cards/coins are the same. I think I need to break that trend!

Another negative test, not a hint of a symptom so far, so fingers crossed. Neet suggested a PCR test, but I am not sure if my exposure warrants it. Also unlikely I could get the results before tomorrow, so plan A still in effect. Take another LFT test in the morning and let people know the full timeline so they can decide.

Big hugs to my best bag and hoping she is still feeling ok.

A Card A Day – week two

Part one. As I mentioned last week I am only going to share 6 cards this weekend, so next weekend I will be one card ahead. That way I don’t have to quickly make a card before I can make my post!

Sunday and Monday:

So this was another case of me trying to make cards from the scraps of other cards LOL! Remember this from last week?

I saved the scraps from that for the next couple of cards, also a very simple style, still masculine

and Tuesday: I still had more scraps and …

… those little surrounds from the circles caught my eye. A quick card, and maybe my favourite!

At that point any other leftover bits went in the bin. Three cards but still plenty of paper in those pads, I’m afraid…

Finally I got to use some different papers for the next card on Tuesday:

Some coordinating patterned paper, some dies I am not sure I have ever used, and a cheap Wish stamp set:

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And yeah, a bit about that – it shows it right on the packaging how the stamps stamp and one word is badly askew:

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In the end I really had to s t r e t c h the stamp so I could snip between the m and the e and get something close to straight. Annoying, but I guess you get what you pay for, right? In the end I went with the die cuts I had previously cut and not used.

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The patterned paper is mounted straight on the card front, the die cut waste over that, and the extra flowers pop-dotted over for some dimension. I kinda feel like it needs … something, but not sure what. Maybe a few pearl dots of something, I don’t know. I might revisit it again.

Extended plates for the Sidekick – re-purposing old stuff and saving £18

I have mentioned in the past that I am loving my Sidekick! This is very much a case of bigger is not better for me. I still have a Grand Calibur, and a Big Shot Pro (I gave my smaller Big Shot away to the local craft club last year) and loads of cutting plates, especially for the Grand Calibur. I think at the time I was buying them you had to buy the pack of all the plates, not just the one you wanted – or maybe buying the pack was more economical. Whatever, I am glad I did it then. Here’s why:

The cutting plates that come with the Sidekick are short. About 4.5 inches by about 2.5. But actually the space allowed is slightly larger, at least 2 3/4 inches with some to spare. I have some dies that just miss out on being usable in the Sidekick and it was super annoying. Like these:

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Or this one, where it is possible to cut the longer dies but only to the 4.5 inch length, so not long enough to fit across a 6 inch card front.

The first thing I did was look for extended cutting plates for the Sidekick. Someone makes them but they cost a lot more that I would have expected (between about £14 and £19, depending on the size) and that was much more than I wanted to spend. I checked out the dimensions of the plates and it is the thickness that gets you, by design I am sure. The standard Sidekick thickness is 1/8 inch, or .32cm. Places that sell cheap perspex to cut to size do round numbers, 3mm, 4mm, etc. Also annoying. I worried that the beveled end might matter a lot in getting the plates to move thru the Sidekick, but just wasn’t sure how much it would matter. I was looking at my old cutting plates, and had a brainstorm. I stacked the pink Embossing plate and the raspberry Adapter plate from the Grand Calibur on top of each other and miracle of miracles they matched the stacked Sidekick plates perfectly! Then it was just the cutting. Hard to believe, and yes, OMG it took some time, but I managed to cut thru (mostly) then snap off cleanly the raspberry plate.

I think because I had little hope it would actually work, I cut across he short width. Mistake. Knowing it DID work, I wish I had done in height-wise for a longer plate. Oh well. No WAY I was going to spend hours scoring the pink plate, as it is much thicker, so The Hubster to the rescue. The Dremel leaves a melted raggety edge, but the hacksaw gives a pretty clean cut. Actually the trick was a table saw for the two ends then a hacksaw to join the cuts – we used the tools we had, what can I say?

And, yeah, it works! BTW, the lack of a beveled edge doesn’t seem to matter at all.

I could have made it ever so slightly wider, and wish I had. I still have one piece of the pink plate we can cut, but by the time we got this one done we really needed to get to the garden centre and get on with essential tasks. But other dies I can now cut on the Sidekick include these two:

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So the question becomes how much is your time worth? Or in this case, The Hubster’s time LOL! Was it worth saving the money, the shipping, the order time, etc? WHY is Sizzix missing a trick here and not offering sightly longer plates? Are they trying to push people towards the Big Shot to get that slightly longer length? And if I did get two plates, one 3mm and one 4mm, would the .6mm difference matter enough? Or the .4 if I went with 2 x 3mm? Is it worth the £10 for three 3mm and one 4mm pieces to find out? maybe….

WOYWW 623 – chaos remains….

Oh my. I decided to reorganize my room – I have no idea why – so I thought I would show you were I am. actually, where I WAS when I knew where my phone was and I could take a photo. It has no SIM card, I just use it for taking photos, so I can’t even call it. I heard it vibrate a minute ago but didn’t get a bead on where it was. Oh well.

This is possibly the most telling photo:

in that you can kinda see my desk in it. But the rest of the room is just as bad, if not worse. This is where my spray box lives and I want to make better use of that space.

And this desk by the window needed to take advantage of the light better. Part of my re-org was hemming the 95 inch curtains (we have HIGH ceilings) to hit the window ledge so I can close them when the sun is at that annoying in-my-eye angle

Only my computer desk remains unscathed! The thing is, I go thru this like five times a year. Every time, when I get to the point where I really need to burrow in and sort out all the little bins of small unrelated items, like the one where I found my WOYWW button (like the one I would show you if I could find my damn phone!) and the many, varied receptacles for paper and cardstock (and there are MANY) I just get fed up and shove it all into some semblance of order and think next time…. THIS time I am attacking it all. Interesting things I found – like that I could bind a book for every week of the year with the Bind It All supplies I have. I think I got send a bunch when I was working for Scrapbook Inspirations so at least I can’t say I overbought. Also, Club Scrap paper and card. OMG I have so much untouched. It is lovely quality cardstock but some of the printed ones are simply UGH.

I wonder – who other than Shaz loved scenic stamping? Cause I have a massive box of stamps of mountains and foliage and rocks, and who knows what else that I accept I will N E V E R use. If you are near Dorset, feel free to stop by after next week LOL!

I found my Man Bites Dog cards finally – Kyla, we can play every Weds. – so there is that too. (found my phone so I am inserting the shot here!)

Before I made my space unworkable, I did finish my WOYWW 12th anniversary ATCs. I have 12 – but 11 to trade, cause I have to keep one. In true WOYWW fashion they were made with the scraps from various projects on my desk. I’m not one to feel I have to hide them and make them a surprise so you might see them in progress a post back.

So just the 100 Days re-cap:

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And today, Day 83:

Yeah. Well I would add it if I COULD FIND MY PHONE WITH THE PHOTO ON IT!

I may have to go get my real phone and take another photo of it – although I really am not keen on the page – stuff went wrong. There was an ink smudge from the facing pages, a rub-on went horribly wrong and I had to place things in a way I didn’t want to to hide those flaws, and the journaling spot really needed inked edges to show up. There – maybe I don’t have to show it …

[sigh] found the phone, so there is no escaping it….See what I mean?

Up at the hospital for IVIG next week so not sure how much I can desk-hop from the hospital WiFi but THIS week, I should manage it OK unless I block myself in while moving stuff about.

LOL! and Happy WOYWW!