Up and away

I am just dropping in here to say that I have been busy last week with a custom order - that's why it had been a little bit quiet, but, shame on me, I can't show you any pictures of the finished book, yet. And I won't do so next week, too. But I am not willingly mean, no. I am simply already - as you may have guessed by this posts heading - away from home and so I will be the whole next week - visiting some friends, helping them move and throwing fresh paint onto their walls ...

So next time, I will be posting some pictures of the book and by that time, it will be already august ... summer is slowly coming to an end over here, which makes me sigh. Don't you also think, time always rushes by too fast?

Coptic headbands

As you may remember - somewhere hidden deeply in a dark corner of your mind, in case it didn't get lost completely, but I won't blame you if so - I won an instructional book about how to make coptic headbands written by buechertiger way back in february. In case you already asked yourself whether I will ever put it to use or have forgotten it, well then, here is the answer ...

No, I definitively haven't.

and another detail shot ...

I hope, I did everything right - in case anyone might notice some mistakes, just tell me, since it is the first time I did those so-called simple two-colored coptic headbands. Anyway, it was fun doing them, and I felt that they add some sturdiness to the finished coptic bound book besides looking very decorative.

Blue water and the heat

For several days now, it's so hot outside and in here, that even the tiniest amout of water seems to promise a refreshment - looks nice, but I am not sure about the taste, though ...

 
Just looking at those fresh and bright colors helped a (very little) bit not to literally melt away within minutes due to the heat - the icecubes in my glass weren't that lucky ... but I guess, it would freak me out, if they had eyes ;) ... see, I must have gotten at least some degree of brain damage due to overheating ;).

Anyway, I still managed to more or less *finish* a new, experimental addition to the inspiration wall.

... *off to eat a huge dish of ice-cream* ...

Old stuff also works

A nice person told me lately, to allow myself to be experimental - and so I did ...

Sometimes, it's the old stuff that works when you don't want to waste *precious* or expensive paints or paper for simple sketches or doodles: pages from an old, discarded book - or my old liner pencils and a simple box of paints which I haven't touched since I left school ... and that was sure a while ago.

Inspirations

Do you know the feeling when you see something that inspires you, and you immediately have to do or make something with this inspiration? Happened to me this weekend when we saw a movie about China - it was just a tiny scene in the movie's intro which was showing some kind of swirls. I tried to work out a *swirly looking* binding (never would have done so last week, but this week I made the binding test cards ...) and here is what I came up with:

Next time, I'd choose a diffent color scheme - red, black and white, perhaps - but as always, I grabbed the next scrap piece of felt, which was a bright green, so I ended up with bright green on the cover, too. The pocket-sized book measures about 11 x 8 cm and is filled with 200 blank, off-white pages with torn egdes. Since it is completely handsewn, I was pretty glad, I made this one rather small ;) ...

The reason why I do not like the color scheme of this book right now is my current liking for bright white and pale blues - only, I didn't even notice before having a closer look on my *inspiration* wall ... ahem, actually just a few pins and doodles on a hemp cord.

... well, seems, inspiration mostly finds you when you are not looking for it, isn't it so?

Stitches

Since I am still giving the sewing machine a time-out, I switched to simple but nice handstitches - a blanket stitch, to be exact - to do sewn egdes of projects for now. Pretty time-consuming, but the results are worth it.

I started with a large suede leather book - size about 21 x 16 cm - with handpainted details on the cover, a handstitched edge and 200 pages of creme-colored, french laid paper with wave cut egdes. I decided to keep the binding rather simple. It is bound in a combination of longstitches and linkstitches, a modifacation of a binding I tested on the binding test cards.

I also made, only much more quickly ;), a birthday card for my sister; thrown together because I did not have a card at hand and let's be honest, because I don't like the cards you mostly find in shops - often, they are too kitschy or too impersonal. The card is simply drawn on a scrap piece of linen-cotton fabric, backed with blank cardboard for writing and the edge is done in blanket stitch.

Since we are living rather far apart, I hope my sister had have a nice birthday party with lots of friends and fun this weekend ... xoxo, big sis.

Use your hands

Let's just resume this week and the one before under the headline *back to basics - doing stuff by hand* ... I don't know whether it is my *magical* hands or the hot weather - the technical stuff I am using seems to beg for a summer vacation. Well, the demon in my sewing machine decided to appear again, nothing new to me - luckily after I finished a birthday present for a friend - a gardening apron, since there are plants all over her home. 

 

So, damn, where to hell have I left the number of the exorcist?

Whereas, the fact that the graphics card of my computer went on strike was pretty new to me. The only positve thing to mention here was that there wasn't much to see either, since the internet skipped working, too ... o_O ... as well as the telephone. Oh, yeah. So, besides a lot of frustrating hours in front of some cryptic programs, updates, test runs and so on I used the time to do some experimental stuff ... ahem ... no presentable results here, so I am just pretending I was trying to take some nice pictures of my messing  around with inks ;)

or my playing around with fimo (polymer clay)...

or my fiddling with threads...

The fiddling with these *binding test cards* was a nice way to work out some bindings and to test how to modify the stitches. So at least, there was one - more or less - presentable result. The first, rather small (5,5 cm x 8 cm) book I made with a leather cover, sewn with linkstitches and a modified longstitch.

The blue book below the leather book still needs to be sewn, but I haven't decided on a binding yet, since the binding should match the handsewn edge ... maybe I will do it today, or maybe, I am just going to enjoy the brilliant summer weather ...

Have a nice weekend, everyone - one without technical issues, but with a lot of sun :)