I Make Books

I know, I know. I've got a lot of Vegas to share with you, and I've already been home for five days. But I'll get on that. Also my 36th birthday deserves some sharing. But first, I'm reading blog posts all about stuff I meant to say even before I left for vacation. How embarrassing!

Here's the latest reminder. Miss Susie over at boygirlparty posted a great tutorial for making your own notebooks. (I just read that today, and made these notebooks before I left for Vegas. Hence my hurried "Wait! I thought of this too!" post...not that I invented notebooks...) I like Moleskines as much as the next girl, but I'm too cheap to shell out that much cash. These are a marvelous compromise, plus I can make them look exactly as I want. Rhonda at My Handbound Books did these a while back (scroll down to the second photo), and made me start collecting cereal boxes, which is the absolute last thing I need to do in my palace of collected junk. So in an attempt to use/reuse, I made these.

These little booklets have 16-24 pages (32-48, back to back) machine sewn into cardboard box covers. They're about 4 x 6 inches. There are about three more, but as soon as I laid them out for a photo, V squealed "Books! I wanna play library!" Then she scooped them all up and shoved them in a variety of bookshelves around the house. I could only find these four. I may never locate the others again.

You can see my stitching isn't as neat or lovely as Susie's, because, as usual, I'm more of a "get 'er done" gal than a "get 'er exactly right" type. I do like the orange thread I used, though, and the paper is from Keiffer's, a local this-and-that store that bought up some sort of art supply surplus and has this great creamy artists paper with a perfect tooth for $1 a sheet. (I can make 2 notebooks out of one sheet). Which means each notebook cost me 50 cents to make, as opposed to Moleskine's $12 a pop or so. For those of you keeping score. Which I am.

I brought the Swiss Chocolate Milk book with me to Vegas, and kept a running scrapbook. As I got receipts/matchbook covers/free crap, I pasted whatever would fit into the pages. It's not quite full, but almost, and I could write about things as I pasted them in, making the usual "pile of vacation stuff" a lot easier to understand and appreciate already.

As a side note, you should also check out Rhonda's steampunk journals: I find steampunk to be an interesting phenomenon, and if I was a boy in a city, I'd be all over it. But as a 36 year old woman in moderately sized town, I just admire from afar.

I wanna quit my job and bind books for a living, but so many people are doing it so wonderfully, I think I should probably stick to teaching. At least until there's a surge in the "get 'er done" style at which I have become so adept...