Diary/Planner/Journal

I recently made this planner for my friend Rosie, who found herself in need of one in March, which is apparently when the stores stop selling planners. Even Powells had run out.

I printed the pages and bound the thing together using chainstitch with a cloth spine and card covers, which is a favourite technique of mine. Hopefully it should hold up pretty well throughout the year.

The front cover. This design is one of a whole bunch of variations I screenprinted a while back, when I was working with this image.

Here's the back cover, another variation on the theme; I don't see why the back cover has to match the front cover. You can see I tore the page edges on this side.

I printed the pages of this planner letterpress-style using metal type on a poster press. This particular press doesn't give you the cleanest print, but it does allow you to change things up easily (especially using magnetic furniture). That's how come every page has a slightly different arrangement of text and images.

My Book

Hello all, and a Happy New Year to you. 2012 is a good number, amirite? It has a good feel to it. Nice solid name for this year. Some good stuff is going to happen in 2012.

Anyhow, I guess this is one of the first things I made in 2012. (Although I may have started this in 2011, these things take flippin' ages to put together.) It's a notebook that I made for myself. I wanted something sturdy, with lots of pages, to last me a long time. It's for my printmaking notes, so I intend to keep writing down information about printmaking techniques and referring back to them (provided my notes make sense in the first place).

I used a variety of different kinds of paper in here, but it's mostly a range of leftover paper and offcuts from printmaking - screenprints, linocuts etc. Some failed or damaged prints torn up and repurposed.

The spine cloth is made of something I printed a while ago onto scrap fabric. It's one of my linocut designs in white ink on pale blue.

Again, I kept the deckle on the outer edge of the papers.

The front is kind of a turquoise blue, the back is a darker blue. I don't see why the covers have to match.

The card covers over the book board are made from salvaged file folders. It's a good, hearty card. Got them from SCRAP, I think. (I love that place. Enough materials to keep you going forever, for like $1.50.)

The binding is your basic linen tape binding.

This elastic band sewn in to hold the book closed is made out of a hair band - super inexpensive. The page marker (very useful) is just an extra length of linen tape; I sewed it into the spine cloth to keep it secure.

So there you go, one book made. I am pretty pleased with it - it may be my best yet, and I think it will suit me well for writing my notes.

Two Notebooks

I recently made these two notebooks. Both are constructed in the same kind of way. The guts of the book are chainstitched, and then I added a home-made bookcloth spine over the top, and the front covers are card sandwiched over the cloth spine and the end page. It's surprisingly sturdy, and since I like using chainstitch this is a good way to add a proper-looking spine.

The one with a red cover was a birthday present for Caity, but the other one I haven't found anything to do with yet. (Maybe if I ever have a table at a street fair again I could try and sell a few notebooks?)

The spine fabric is block-printed, although not by me. Also, I had a variety of papers in here, including some offcuts from printmaking that still had the deckle, so I kept all those on one side. I quite like a fuzzier edge to a book.

For the end papers I had some test prints from my letterpress internship. Those are some demo sentences that I typeset for all the fonts they have - "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs". We like to use slightly suggestive sounding pangrams.

I got a whole lot of cheap cloth offcuts from a haberdashery, and used them for bookcloth.

For this notebook, the torn edges are at the side. There's also a whole variety of different kinds of paper in there.

My Booky-Wooks

So here are some books I made for friends of mine. These are a ton of fun to make, I think people like them as gifts, and the more books I make the less likely I am to forget how to do it. (Use the skills or lose 'em, especially if you have a sieve memory like myself.) I try to make these things from salvaged materials as much as possible, because it's cheaper and I don't like a waste. Plus it's fun to find some new source of paper or cloth or something, makes me feel crafty.

Amy's book:

The spine is covered with cloth offcuts I got from some lady who hand-prints her own fabric (one dollar, thank you very much), purple paper for the cover, and the insides are old screenprints of mine (the green and purple houses), letterpressed trees from my internship, and a variety of paper samples from paper companies (nicked those from school).

Sophie's book:

Rainbow in the middle! Everyone loves rainbow. Except when you get to the pages made of red, and then it's hard to write on. But you can skip those.

Liz's book:

Leah's book:

The red and cream cloth for the spine is made from this shirt I got from Goodwill; nice cloth for bookmaking but horrible as an entire large men's shirt. The pages inside are white and cream paper, and there's also some letterpressed pieces left over from my internship - they say 'happy' on them, which I thought was appropriate for a birthday/wedding present, while hopefully not hitting you over the head with it.

Caity's book:

This one has an extra little flap to cover the pages. The edging is some electrical tape I think, I nicked it from my girlfriend because she uses it to secure bar tape on bike handlebars. (And then I borrowed it and used the whole roll. Basically, I am a bad girlfriend.) Anyway, it makes the notebook super durable, but it's flexible so the covers don't warp.

My book:

Made this one for myself to take notes during art history class. This kind of notebook is probably best for taking notes, since I used pretty basic paper. You don't want to use them for drawing, or saving for best. In this one half of it is made out of photocopies of stuff I used for another project. It's architecture, rock formations, and a bunch of other stuff that makes a nice pattern. You can write on the other side.

A Complementary Duo of Dinky Notebooks

I made a couple of little notebooks using my wizard bookbinding skills. Although I don't suppose you would call this a binding in the traditional sense.


I used redundant catalog cards from the college library for the pages (they weren't going to be used again, damn you computers and your library databases!). The covers are backed with some handprinted fabric offcuts I got from a woodblock artist in Eugene, with purple fancy paper for the end pages. The pages are held together with those little keyring things, making use of the holes punched in the cards when they go in those fancy old card catalog cabinets. You ought to be able to remove or rearrange the pages.


The brown notebook has the category cards, the very slightly smaller green notebook has the individual entries and dewey numbers. I gave them to my friends Jen and Lucy, I hope they will make teacherly notes in them, for they are teacherly types. Or they could write down shopping lists, ideas, inspirations, or the inappropriate things that people say.