Book It!

Hello all and welcome.  It's time for a new challenge at A Vintage Journey, and the lovely Deb wants us to "Book It!".  You could make a handmade book or journal, or create something inspired by your favourite book (but please tell us what book it is).  After flying high with my Having Fun Flying pages, I'm afraid I slightly crashed and burned with this one.  Several projects are now on display in the rubbish bin, and I've ended up with what feels like a ridiculously simple make for you today.

Still, if inspiration is a little thin on the ground here at Words & Pictures, you can be sure my fellow Creative Guides over at A Vintage Journey will be filling in the gaps if you hop over to take a look, and we hope you'll come and share your book projects with us somewhere along the road this month.  But before you hop off, take a look at my simple project and see what you think.

With several failed mixed media efforts biting the dust - I was just in one of those moods where nothing made me happy, and with every failure the mood got darker! - I've definitely cheated slightly.  Rather than hand-making my books from scratch, these are simply little notebooks which I've covered with some experimental Oxide tags which had been sitting around pretty much since the release of the (much longed for here) Stormy Sky Distress Oxide pad last July.

Underneath, these are just small kraft notebooks (3.5 x 5.5 inches).  I use them a lot for taking notes during previews when I'm working in the theatre, so I always have a few sets of them hanging around.














When I'm playing with ink and tags, I usually work in pairs, dipping and mopping, so there was a tag for the front cover and a tag for the back cover for each notebook.  All I had to do was snip the tops off, glue them down, and trim the corners to fit.










The tags were standard #8 manila ones, and they weren't quite wide enough for the whole cover, so I used some sticky-backed linen ribbon to create a "binding" for the spine.















Regulars will know how much I enjoy my wrinkle-free distressing...














... and often there's so much delight in these inky splotches and splatters that I'm reluctant to cover them up.













So, as far as that goes, this project is actually a resounding success.  The fabulous combination of Oxides and Distress Inks and water splatters gets to take centre stage.















I love that misty Oxide effect and the vibrant ink splatters in between.













Just the simplest of embellishments... these will be working notebooks, after all.















I applied the Stormy Sky Oxide pad direct to the Idea-ology Muse Tokens' surfaces, and it created the perfect highlighting of the lettering.








Job done!  And they look good from the back too...  Given they're in my favourite blues and browns, and given that I'm of a minimalist mind when I comes to the look of my personal possessions (not that I succeed with minimalism in terms of amounts of stuff, of course), these do please me rather a lot in the end.

I just feel a bit guilty that they were so easy to make!  But just occasionally a shortcut is allowed, I hope.  Thanks so much for dropping in today, and do hop over to A Vintage Journey to see the literary delights the other Creative Guides have come up with to inspire you.  We hope to see you en route.  Happy bookish crafting all!

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero