The circle of projects

From the files of “Things I’ve Been Up To But Haven’t Taken Pictures Of”, come the book made of envelopes and the notebook of vintage paper. I made the envelope book after seeing a similar item for sale at Renegade. That one was held together by taped tabs that you could see on the outsides of the envelope. I thought it was a really great idea, but the execution was very poor. I immediately came home and made a better one. It’s saddle stitched in the binding and I added spacers to compensate for the future expansion of the envelopes. When making it, I discovered I didn’t have any thread; so I used dental floss that I dyed brown on the ends that showed. Kathy gave me a lot of book cloth when she moved so that went into the binding and the paper covering is from some tissue paper I saved from a present I got almost two years ago. I think the only material I actually had to purchase for the book was the ribbon, the needle, and the glue. Everything else is stuff I’ve collected and saved from rubbish bins. I enjoy making beautiful things out of what other people would consider trash.

The notebook I made because I got caught up in the fever of book making. I had purchase a postcard booklet at an antique store in Walterboro and there were a lot of extra papers in the booklet. I wanted to use them for something because they were so wonderfully colored with age; some even had ghosted images of the postcards on them. I decided to cut in some other vintage papers and make a sort of hodgepodge paper notebook. You can see the different papers in the photo. I’m going to take them to the DIY Trunk show and see how they sell. Maybe I’ll eventually sell them on the site depending on how they do.

The DIY Trunk Show