no cover yet

This is the first time I have actually sewed a "book" from start to finish...... not that it is finished, since I have no cover. I have a Journal Maker Crush on LK Ludwig, especially her book Creative Wildfire, though her Nature Journals book is a really close second.  I'm not a nature journalist, but the journals are way creative and fun.

If you look too closely at the spine you will see that I changed my mind about how to do those center stitches halfway through in an attempt to make the pages snug up against each other better than they were.

I used her method of adding color to the pages before binding them. It is detailed in the book but she uses old credit cards and scrapes acrylic paint deep into the paper, two layers, and uses a variety of things to make patterns and shapes. What is nice about her method is that the pages do NOT stick together, which has always annoyed me about journal pages or any kind of page with acrylic.

I am planning to use my huge backlog of photos in these books, not scrapbook style but more integrated into the pages. We shall see how successful I am, but I am quite happy with my imperfect binding. All I have to do is find a cover piece I want to use. The ties go onto the cover and are sewn onto it. Once Inspiration (with a capital letter, no less) strikes, I will post the next phase.