We are literally counting down the days until we leave Texas for our new home in Colorado. We're super excited (We have a place to live now--yeah!) but all the last minute details are consuming our almost every thought. So, I will probably be posting sporadically for a little while until we get settled into our new home and back to some kind of normal routine. Also, I am waaaay behind on responding to comments and emails so if I owe you an email, I will get back to you but it just may be on the other side of this move. I hate to put it off because each of your comments and questions are so important to me.
Some of you have asked about my spiral bound remains of the day journal. Just to clarify, the original design of the journal came from the ingenious Mary Ann Mossand I made it after taking her online class Remains of the Day--highly recommended!! Anyway, the original design involved making signatures out of stitched pages and sewing them into a fabric cover like the one I made here and here. But these journals are so great you can't make just one and one night I found myself needinga new one before I could fall asleep peacefully but, unfortunately, I had already packed up the waxed thread I needed to sew in the signatures. After initially despairing, I decided to try something different and use my binding tool to spiral bind the journal I showed you in my last post. I think it worked great but then I have a love/hate relationship with spiral binding.
I don't really know much about punch/binding systems but I use a Bind-it-Allby Zutter Innovative Products because that is what I could find locally. It comes with a contraption that punches holes in your pages and then closes the wire binding rings (Called 'Combs'. You have to buy these separately. I bought mine here.) around the pages to hold it all together. It's pricier than I normally like to pay for art tools but I used a 40% off coupon, which helps, and it's worked great for me so far. I definitely think it was worth the money (with the discount) and I've found tons of uses for it. I even started binding up some of my homeschool supplies just because I could.
What I did differently with this journal, was to simply cut the folded signatures I had made previously in half and punch holes alone one side with the Bind-it-All. I chose two pieces of chipboard about the same size as my pages and made them into covers. After that, I just sewed an extra flap onto the fabric cover of the journal like a book cover and slipped the chipboard covers inside the flaps to hold it in. The fabric cover then works like a book jacket to hold in the bound pages.
I hope this all makes sense. I'll try to get some pictures of the inside fabric cover once we get to Colorado, but I wanted to let you know how it all worked before then. Mary Ann has given us the ok to sell journals based entirely or loosely on her designs so I may actually take a stab at making some with spiral bindings for my Etsy shop, but I haven't thought all that through yet. Meanwhile, I do have some journals over there that can keep you busy recording your memories now until you get your own Remains of the Day journal made! You can never have too many journals. Trust me on this one.
