Paint Pours and Long Stitches

 

I created this book with the help of a friend ... well, two friends actually! I learned the book structure from Ali Manning as part of my Handbook Book Club membership. It's a variation on a long stitch that I added to a bit to sew the spine covering to the book a bit more. 

But let's talk about that beautiful cover!  It's made from a paint pour that a sweet family friend created. She was looking to find a home for several she did and I told her I'd be happy to purchase them from her as long as she was happy with them possibly becoming books! And she loved the way this came out!  I've made two of these so far with Hannah's paint pours and I plan to create a few more with this stitch as I feel it fits perfectly! The finished size is 5 x 7" and it's filled with Canson Mixed Media paper for a variety of uses. It'll be on my website next time I get around to an update!

 

For me, this is an example of thinking outside the box, and it's made me look at other "old paintings looking for new homes" in a different light. I LOVE wandering through antique stores and thrift stores, and I often look for old books needing a new life in those places. Now I'll be looking at old paintings a little differently as well! So many things in thrift stores end up in the landfill, so why not rescue what I can to give it new life. Of course, I can spend hours going down the rabbit hole of watching furniture flips, so ... who knows! That could be in my future when I retire!

Snapdragons and Crazy Brains

Funny story behind this journal I finished up yesterday regarding how my brain works. Comically, I have this theory that I can clean up my studio by finishing up projects. This never works. Why? Because my brain has a tendency to go down rabbit holes pretty quickly. I had been saving my Dove soap boxes to create some tiny journals like this one and decided I could use up some of the off cut paper on my table to make signatures for those tiny journals. I had several signatures all folded and ready to go when I remembered some graph paper I had that would be a nice addition to the signatures. I just knew that graph paper was in one of the cubbies over there under my laptop. Searching for that paper, I found the paper I used in this journal, but we aren't nearly there yet.

I came across this box of Fabriano Artistico folded cards that I'd had for years and had yet to use, so I pulled that box out and started folding a few sheets to see how it would work together for signatures. Beautifully!  I folded a few and then remembered that I had sat down on the floor actually looking for the graph paper for the tiny journals, so I sat that box down and set those few signatures aside and went back to looking for the graph paper. In one of the cubbies on the other side, I didn't find the graph paper, but I did find some books I had picked up from Goodwill that I thought would make good junk journals. But really, I'd had them for a while and they were in great shape and I did have a garage sale coming up, so maybe I should just put them in the garage sale ... so I proceeded to take all the pricing stickers off those and set them in a pile for the garage sale. Oh, right!  Graph paper, I was looking graph paper!  Oooh!!! Then I came back across the more than 100-year-old Bible I picked up at a neighborhood garage sale for $3. (Of course, I had to rescue it.) It was in pretty bad shape, but I figured I could clean it up and maybe even find its rightful owner.  Holding it in my hands again (graph paper, what graph paper?), I decided that at that moment, it was about dang time I did something with that Bible. So on a whim, I grabbed some scissors and trimmed down the cover where it had separated to just clean up the edges a bit thinking, hmmm, maybe I could fashion a new cover out of Kraft-tex.  I cleaned her all up and then started flipping through it again, and I came back across the memorial notice of one Paul Taylor who passed away at the age of 74 in 1954 in Deland. Tucked in with dear Paul's memorial notice, a family member had included some newspaper clippings and his obituary. Among other family members, Paul left behind daughter Helen Milliken of Tallahassee. Aha!  Perhaps that's how the Bible ended up in a garage sale in Tallahassee.

So off to Google I went to try to find Helen Milliken of Tallahassee. Of course, dear Paul was 74 when he died, so Helen was likely in her 50s then - in 1954 - so unless Guinness missed her as the oldest living human, she was no longer with us. But that did not stop me!  Maybe I could find dear Helen's obituary and find other members of her family still in Tallahassee. But alas, I could not find Helen Milliken of Tallahassee.  But hey!  Helen Milliken of Michigan, she's done some stuff!  She was the First Lady of Michigan Governor William Milliken and quite the political force in her own right! This Helen was the longest-lived First Lady in Michigan history, living to 99 years old and first lady for 14, and was a women's rights activist and environmentalist. During the 1970's, she was one of the leading proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment had been passed by the United States Congress in 1972 and was ratified by thirty-five states, including Michigan, in the next few years.^. When the 1980 Republican National Convention, held in Detriot, removed language supporting the ERA from the convention platform, Helen, still First Lady of Michigan at the time, boycotted the convention's opening ceremony to attend a pro-ERA protest. You go, Helen! Thank you! (and thank you, Wikipedia, for that nugget.)  

Well, since I could not find Helen Milliken of Tallahassee, I put the Bible back in its cubby for now. I had completely forgotten about the graph paper at this point, so I sat back on the floor and created more signature with that yummy Fabriano Artistico paper I found. And three days later, I finished this journal.  I still haven't found the graph paper, nor made any further progress on the tiny journals, nor cleaned up my studio. But I did finish this journal. I'll keep you posted on the Bible rehab! 

Guest Artist for Vintage Page Designs

Hey there! I was invited to be a guest artist for the upcoming 5-Day Journal Challenge with Ali Manning's Vintage Page Designs. That meant I got early access to the videos! Here's my interpretation of the book. The challenge starts on March 7, and you can sign up on Ali's website here. Don't worry if you've never made a journal before! Ali is an amazing teacher, and she'll break it down for you step by step. This is a great structure to start with as it's not very complicated. Of course, adding beads and bling will be completely up to you!

Tiny Journal for Tiny Art - Made from?

I had so much fun working in my tiny journal that I decided to make another, this one out of a Dove soap box! I've been making journals from upcycled cereal boxes for years, so why not go tiny with a soap box! And I've been a Dove girl for as long as I can remember! I haven't started working in this yet, so far now it's just sitting pretty on one of my shelves.

#100daysofuseitupkelly - 2021 Day 75

I finally got around to the April book for the Handmade Book Club with Ali Manning and Vintage Page Designs. This is a sewn over tapes binding. Neat story with this one...⁣
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A friend of mine who's father recently passed away posted his entire National Geographic magazine collection on Facebook marketplace. I commented that ... "OMG, I'm a total Nat Geo junkie, but I absolutely don't need these." But she sent me a message that said, "Kelly, please take these! I will give them to you free because I know you will do amazing things with them!"

 

Soon I had 10 bankers boxes full of Nat Geos in my garage. And her dad's collection included part of her great-grandmother's collection, so there are editions back to the 1930s! My hubs and I have been having fun going through them and putting them in order (and he's hoarding the 1960s editions to relive his childhood!).

So as a thank you, I made this book for her. The cover papers are from a 1991 Nat Geo map insert of Germany. It's not perfect (I attached the back cover upside down, but hey! that just means it's like one of those two-sided magazines!) and I love the way it turned out. ⁣Ali's Handmade Book Club is probably my favorite of the groups I'm involved with.  Each month, Ali challenges us with a new book structure, some more challenging that others. I made this one a little differently than the way she taught it, and since I have quite a bit of experience making books now, I'm finding that I'm able to alter want I want to. Next time I make this one, I'll probably do a French link stitch over the tapes instead of a straight long stitch to jazz it up a bit.  See all of my 2021 100 day project posts over on my Instagram feed.

#100daysofuseitupkelly - 2021 Day 22

Sharing a few close-ups of my 2021 #the100dayproject.  This year I've stuck with my hashtag from last year of #100daysofuseitupkelly. I figured it still applied since I still have sooo .... much .... stuff ....to .... use .... up.

I made this fun little house shaped book during a virtual retreat through our Handmade Book Club, with the amazing Ali Manning from Vintage Page Designs. The retreat was led by D.J. Gaskin. See more of D.J.'s work on Instagram @djgaskin29 here. (And did you know that you don't have to have an Instagram account to check out someone's Instagram feed!? Just a link like the one I just gave you!)

This book started its life as a CheezIt Box. Yep, a CheezIt box!  I am all about recycling and repurposing around here, and I love to use snack and cereal boxes in my book projects. 

And what makes this one even more fun is that the pages are cut from Publix grocery bags.  I'll share a few peeks of the inside later. I decided that this needed to be my little house of critters, so I'm hoping to complete each spread with a critter theme. Thanks for stopping in today!  

Chunky Collaged Book with Handmade Book Club

I created this fun little book during a one-day virtual retreat with my Handbook Book Club, led by Ali Manning at Vintage Page Designs. It was super fun. From start to finish, this chunky little book was created in about six non-stop hours. It's 4 3/4" by 3 1/4" and about 2" thick!

There are 18 total signatures, each an individual folio that was made by cutting down large sheets of mixed media paper that I collaged before trimming to size. It's sewn with an Ethopian coptic binding. It's just plain fun to look at and to hold. I haven't decided if I'm going to add anything further to it, or just leave it as is. Thanks to Ali for a super fun day of creating.

Jumping Into a Junk Journal

I've been fascinated by junk journals lately. I actually created my first very simple one last August in a class with Kiala Givehand and Tiffany Goff Smith, and I used that one for Kasia Avery's art journaling advent calendar last December. So while I was at home in Jacksonville earlier this summer, I decided to create my first more in-depth one with whatever I had on hand there at home!

I started with an Daily Q&A book that I never used and cut the book block out. I collaged painted and stenciled on the cover and then went from there! I added in a variety of "junk" papers, i.e. old sheet music, old book pages, maps, scrapbook paper scraps, etc, but the one thing I did not like about working in that first simple junk journal I created was that all the papers were a bit thin.

To remedy that, I added good quality mixed media paper to the signatures. Before sewing it all together, I created some tuck spots and sewed in a few bits and bobs here and there. It was a fun process! I can see how they can become a bit addicting!

Week 4 - #100daysofuseitupkelly

Week 4 for my #100daysofuseitupkelly 100 Day Project!  This week I completed three books.  The colorful French link stitch book was part of our Handmade Book Club. And I love my Bit O Honey book. I polished off that box and inspiration struck! I also completed some more fun tags, a couple journal pages and a pair of earrings which I've since sent to a friend making masks for a trade.  Hope you are doing well with all that is going on in our world this week.  You can see all my 100 Day Project posts for this year on my Instagram account here, and you can learn more about the 100 Day Project here!

Finding Time for Bookbinding ... and Lots of Other Stuff

Well, hello there, old friends. Been a while since I've checked in here, hasn't it! My world had been getting a little overwhelming with the work, family, and the time to create juggle, but aren't we all on a pause now? I hope you and yours are doing as well as can be expected in these unprecedented pandemic times we are now working through.

As I work in higher education athletics and activities, everything has pretty much shut down for us for a while, and we're primarily all working from home, so I've been trying to find a new normal for me and my family. It's definitely a challenge keeping teenagers motivated! My girls have been on an extended two-week Spring Break, but they will be resuming school online starting Monday. I'm hoping to get them to a little better schedule that does not involve sleeping in until 10am daily!

I made this sweet little book a couple weeks ago. The covers are from a colorful almond box I found empty in our office break room, happy that no one had thrown it away! I'm packing it up and sending it off to a friend in California as a little surprise. Take care of yourself and your friends and family, and maybe use this time to decompress and rest. I've been wondering if this has been a message from God, the Universe, the Earth, whomever you believe sends messages, that maybe we all needed to slow down and take some time to appreciate everything we have. Be well.

 

Handmade Book Club: Paired Needle Coptic Stitch

I stumbled across Ali Manning and Vintage Page Designs on Instagram late last summer and was immediately smitten!  Ali is an amazing book artist up in Massachusetts.  I joined her newsletter and started closely following her on Instagram, and thankfully right about that time, she sent out a query to her newsletter subscribers to see if we had any interest in creating a handmade book club of sorts. Clearly, many of us said, "Yes, please!!!" and Ali's Handmade Book Club was born.

This is the first book I made as part of the group.  It's a paired needed coptic stitch, which I learned before from Lori Vleigen, but there was a little twist in the way Ali did this with a thick book board cover that I had never seen before.  I just made one book from that lesson since I was crunched for time (as you know I always am....), but I'm really happy with the method and my little book. This is a wee one at 3" by 2 3/4".  More to come! 

2017 Documented Life Project: September

Hello, there! Thanks for stopping in today! Continuing in sharing my 2017 Documented Life Project, September started out with a beautiful Labor Day weekend--this photo above is from our dock looking upriver...

...and then Hurricane Irma hit...while last year Hurricane Matthew left us a tree in our roof, this year Irma gave us nearly a foot of water on our ground floor, about six or seven docks in our backyard, our dock in shambles and damage once again to our roof. While we got the flood mess cleaned up within a week or so, the rest has taken a bit longer. The roofers actually just finished the roof this past week! And we've not even begun to work on the dock. We're hoping to be able to just repair what we have instead of completely rebuilding. We're lucky that we have any dock left! Most of our neighbors' docks were completely destroyed.

I love the ways the greens played off each other in this spread. On the right, that's just one magazine page that I tore apart and popped in there. Making things as easy as possible!  You can click on the photo to see it larger in Flickr.

I started incorporating some of the pages I created in Pam Carriker's workshop this month. This "window" started out as transparency. Pam was using them to teach image transfers, but I actually liked using the transparency itself!

Clearly I struggle with faces. :-)

And these last two were actually one spread that I pulled out and used as two here. We were creating in a Strathmore mixed media journal, but I ended up pulling each page out and using them here in this journal, finding ways to incorporate both the front and back of each page. You'll see more in October's pages!  The faces here were printed on tissue paper, so they just basically dissolve into the page. Very cool technique. Now if I can just get my printer to print on tissue paper correctly...

Thanks for stopping in again today! To see more of my 2017 Documented Life Project journal, click here. For 2016, click here; for 2015, click here; and for 2014, click here. Thanks to the ladies at Art to the 5th for originally creating the project!

Coptic Stitch Books

I finished a couple more coptic stitch books. These are a bit larger than my little tea book! The covers are made from 6 x 9" sheets of water color paper folded in half for a finished book size of 4 1/2" x 6".

I started with the 6 x 9 paper flat and wet it with a very wet brush. Then I sprayed a couple different colors of inks and picked up the paper to move the inks around. Lastly I sprinkled some salt on them while they were still wet.

Once they were completely dry, I brushed the salt off and that leaves you with the cool mottled effect. If I remember correctly, I learned that little trick from Wyanne Thompson when she was still living just up the road from me in Amelia!

I sewed in six signatures of four folios each giving the books 48 front and back pages of mixed media paper, perfect for wet or dry media painting, sketching or journaling. I have two more ready to sew in different colors. I'll start listing these in my Etsy store and on my website soon ... once I decide I can part with them. That's been the challenge with my bookmaking projects. I never want to let them go!

A Sweet Little Tea Book

While we've been home in Jacksonville this summer, I've been working on my coptic stitch for bookbinding. I created this little nugget last night. It's just 2 1/4" square!

This is a four-needle stitch (or one needle for each sewing station, however many you choose!) that I learned from my sweet friend Lori Vliegen. There is definitely a learning curve on this one since you have four needles going at the same time, my biggest lesson being how to keep from getting blood on your book when you poke yourself with one of four needles (or two or three needles, but really, who's counting?)

One of my goals this year has been to use up stuff that I have around. I had some paper left over from a Mermaids and Mamas book project, which I used for the signatures for this book. While I was sitting at the kitchen table sewing it all up, Sarah came over and watched for a bit. She said, "Aw, that's so cute and small and .... WAIT A MINUTE! IS THAT A TEA BAG BOX!??!?!!" So yes, the covers are from a tea bag box, my favorite flavor actually.

I'm having fun making these little tinies...there will be more to come!  You can learn this stitch from Lori by taking her class here. I had the benefit of learning it in person since she's in the Jacksonville area!  Thanks again, Lori!