Journal-making Season

My art-making tends to have its seasons, influencing what I work on at various times of the year based on external circumstances. I mean, I have my internal inspirations, which are both constant and constantly changing, but it's those immutable events throughout the year that cause me to set aside some things for the sake of completing others.

It's one of the reasons I sign up for my neighborhood art crawl, which takes place on the third weekend of September (except last year, because COVID, of course).  It's organized by the League of Longfellow Artists (LoLa) for creative folks in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis to showcase their artistic output. 

LoLa gives me a deadline that motivates me to finish things I've been dragging out, and make new things to show and, hopefully, sell. I also enjoy the face-to-face interaction with neighbors and strangers and people I know and others I only kind of know—although two days of that is quite enough for this introverted artist. After that, I'm quite happy to retreat to my studio and focus on completing the Useful Calendar— my next art-making season.

I really just wanted to show you some of the journals I've been making lately, but I felt the need to put them in some kind of context, and then the whole art-making seasons idea came to me. 

So. I make journals for the LoLa art crawl and then after the weekend I consign the ones that are left over with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in plenty of time for holiday shopping. In 2020, we cancelled LoLa, the MCBA was closed, and I didn't make any journals, so I was a little concerned that I may have forgotten how to make them. I did have to consult my notes for the first ones, but I soon got in the groove again. Like riding a bicycle, I suppose.

I always put a pocket inside the back covers, which holds a "library card" with  information about the journal, and my bookmark-style business card

The ones I'm showing you in this post are all casebound, with a flat spine rather than a curved one because they're a bit more user-friendly that way: you can make them lie flat when opened fairly easily. 

Casebound journals are a bit more involved than other types I also make, such as Coptic and secret Belgian, which I'll show you in my next post. For casebound journals, the spine is stitched, then glued, then reinforced with a fabric called mull and a strip of paper glued the almost-length of the spine. Optional but desirable is the addition of headbands at the top and bottom of the spine to protect the inner edges of the pages, and, one of my favorites, a ribbon page marker; because if I'm gluing all that stuff to the spine anyway, why not add that nifty little touch? 

You can buy headband material that looks like the old-style handstitched headbands, but when I read that binderies used to make them using leftover shirt fabric, I thought that was a really cool way to make my own. I wrap strips of cotton fabric around a hemp cord and glue it with the same PVA glue I use in the other stages of making the book. Then I select a color that goes with the cover and cut off a piece the width of the spine. (I wrote about making headbands in this post a few years ago, should you want to read more about it.) 

I've been using only supplies I already have on hand, and I make the journals in a range of sizes, largely determined by available materials. The red/postal journal shown at top and below is a full 5-1/2 by 8-1/2 inches, the next one is about half that size, and this last one, above, with William Morris's "Strawberry Thief" on the cover, is about 4 inches high.  I'll have a few in each size available for LoLa. 

To find me during LoLa, see my artist page on the LoLa website.

Here's a photo of my ribbons, mull fabric, and prepared headband strips, just for a little postscript. Some of the headbands really are made with fabric cut from my husband's worn-out shirts, others are just from scraps too small to use for anything else.

Little Boxes

I've been making little boxes this summer and it occurred to me that there's no need to keep that as my little secret, so let me tell you — and show you — a little bit about them. The boxes shown here (and more boxes yet to be made) will all be available at my site during the LoLa art crawl in September. (My page on the LoLa website is here.)

A couple of years ago I had taken an in-person class (remember those?) at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts on how to make a specific type of box called a clamshell, which are mainly made to protect old books. That's a worthwhile thing and I do intend to make them for the old Bibles that my husband and I each inherited from our mothers. But the real reason I took the class on making clamshell boxes was because it was the only box-making class being offered at the time.

So when they offered an introduction to box making via Zoom this June, I was happy to jump in. What I really want to make are small lidded boxes and that's what this class was about. The boxes we made for the class were about 4" by 6". After finishing those, I started making smaller ones, both because I really like small things and also because I like using up scraps and bits that are too small to make much, but that I like too much to discard.  

For example, in the photo above, the small neutral-colored box in the back to the left has a decorative square on the lid covered with a piece cut from a metallic gold envelope somebody used to send us a greeting card. And I'm really tickled by the blue-and-white one at the front, which is covered entirely in security envelopes, then topped with a vintage shanked button. That box is about 2" by 3" and is constructed with scrap chipboard left over from other projects.

This green box is a good example of using up leftover supplies. I bought the green book cloth this summer, but the rest of the materials I found by rummaging in my scraps. I've had the green paisley paper for a very long time and I don't know when or where I first acquired it. The lining of both the lid and the box (the bottom part of the box is called the tray) is the last of some scrapbooking paper I bought when I used to use that type of paper to make sleeves for my calendar cards. I love the distressed look and the pastel colors, especially pale pink! With subtle green polka dots! So I made a box small enough to use the available scraps I had.

The handle at the top, as you have no doubt guessed, is a vintage wooden game piece, like from Sorry or something. It has a lovely aged patina and is the perfect shade of green to go with the other materials, don't you think?

I'm also making journals for LoLa, and some of those are also small, to use up leftover materials. But that's a topic for a different blog post.