How To Make a Very Simple Notebook

Recently in the MadeStuff house there has been a tidying up effort.  Many of our supplies have been stored in the one room that we really need to renovate so Alasdair has been busy boxing up supplies and moving them to another room while I’ve been busy making new things out of old supplies!

Last year we had a load of photos printed for sale at craft fairs and spent many hours mounting them.  There’s only so much mounting that you can stand so naturally there were some left over.  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been making notebooks with the leftovers and I want to share with you how to make them.

The first thing you need to do is find a nice size of photo (ours are 6×8) and remove any white space from the top and bottom.

Then you need some paper that is cut to be bigger than your photo height and width, quite a bit bigger or you’ll struggle to cut the pages square.  You need several sheets of paper (I had 7 to give my book 28 pages).

Fold the photo in half widthways and mark 1cm intervals right down the middle of the fold (on the unprinted side).  Try and leave the same amount of space at each end.

Fold your paper in half and place each sheet of paper on top of the other, with the photo on top (wrong side up).

Take a large book such as the phone book, or I used the Screwfix catalogue and open it towards the middle.  Place your pile of paper and photo so the the fold of the pile sits in the spine of the book.

Take a dressmakers pin, or drawing pin, or any sort of pin (you might have the proper tool, I don’t) and stick it through the pile of paper at the marked 1cm intervals.  Make sure each hole goes all the way through.

Once all of the holes have been made take the photo from the top of the pile and put it on the bottom, photo side out.

Take a long length of strong thread and start sewing a running stitch through the holes to sew the pages together.  When you get to the last hole, sew all the way back to the top again.  Secure with square stitches and cut the end off.  You could also attach beads to the ends for a decorative bookmark.

Close the book over and use a paper cutting knife to trim the edges square all the way through.  If you’ve got access to a guillotine then I suggest you use that to save your hands the pain of cutting through pages and pages of paper.

Put the closed notebook under something heavy to encourage it to stay closed.

That’s it…seemed easier to do than to write down so I hope that’s easy enough to follow.

I added some nice cellophane and button packaging which you could do if you want to give one of your hand bound books as a gift.

It’s a bit like the Hitchcock classic around here

Hitchcock’s, The Birds, was one of my favourite films as I grew up, the eerie notion that birds of all shapes and sizes should be overcome with an insatiable lust for human flesh, attacking young and old alike without provocation and otherwise simply sitting and waiting on some playground climbing frame for their next unsuspecting victim …

… actually, no, it’s nothing like that around here … although we do seem to have an increasing number of slightly suspicious looking birds sitting in the windowsill!  And so it was that I finished my latest papier mache birds.  My latest obsession.

In terms of scale the one in the middle is a tad over 6″ tall at it’s tallest point.  I decided to render these ones in shades of green with the now familiar pattern of white dots, I’ve got a couple more under-way as I type this, although I imagine it’ll be a good few days before I finish them – other commitments such as life tends to throw at you … like blocked drains … ugh!

As ever, these are available to buy from our shop.

more bonnie birds … an obsession in papier mache!

It’s funny how an idea can sprout wings and take-off (dreadful pun entirely intended), such as it has been with these bonnie birds.  It’s rather refreshing to have something I can make out of papier mache that doesn’t take forever and a day and that isn’t a bowl!  Aside from this pair I’m hatching three more and they should be fully fledged in the next few days (and yes, that was a couple more of dreadful puns that were entirely intended).

This pair seem to be diametrically opposed in terms of form, one’s short and fat and the other a bit leggy with a great fan of a tail, the tail’s something I can see me repeating and refining on future versions.

Of course, like all birds that flock, it doesn’t take long for them to catch-up with more of their own kind …

… I imagine this flock will be growing as they, ahem, get to know each other better … well, it is almost Spring!!

All of these birds are available for sale in our shop.

Vintage Button Pendants

I’ve been busy making layered button pendants today from some of my vintage button collection.  These buttons have been collected from various elderly relatives over the years and there are some amazing buttons within that collection, some of which make great pendants within themselves.

I’ve not even scratched the surface of the buttons I have, which makes it really time consuming to come up with combinations.  There must be millions of possibilities.  Here are a few that I’ve made this morning that are now dry.  There are others just waiting for the glue to dry.

All but the last one are available in our Coriandr shop.  I’m not at all happy with the quality of the last one…you can see the glue under the heart button.

Tartan Owl Ornament

This tartan chap was created as a commission this weekend.  In keeping with our attempts to reduce waste, he’s made from a piece of tartan that would have otherwise been binned and some ecospun felt.  Stuffed, as usual, with reclaimed polyester stuffing.

He’s got a bit of a problem though.  Whilst out for his morning walk, he came across a very strange object.  It looked like a grassy mound but he couldn’t be sure.

At first he stood next to the mound, he thought it enhanced his green wings and the green stripes in his tartan, but after a while he became suspicious that the object wasn’t a grassy mound at all but an owl eating alien so he made a hasty retreat to his new home.

Wall art W.I.P.

It’s always a bit of struggle for me to get back into the swing of the craft thing following the festive frivolities, of course it hasn’t helped that we were on emergency fuel rations until our delivery arrived Wednesday and I had to spend the next three days shifting it up the hill to the house … that’s another story though!

Currently I’m working on this piece of wall art that I last picked up during late November or December and following the break I’ve lacked any kind of motivation to pick it up again.  Losing momentum can be a real struggle at times and until you can gather yourself to move on projects can idle and die, this can be a real issue with materials like papier mache which require long drying periods in between adding layers or building up texture or depth.

The concept isn’t exactly a new one but it’s one I’ve been keen to experiment with and following my fourth sub-standard painting on this canvas I decided it was time to use it for something other than painting … I suppose you might suggest that the previous efforts have been consumed by the character emerging from the canvas now.  He certainly looks like he might have a touch of indigestion!

handmade felt christmas tree decorations

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later … that’s right the spirit of Christmas has finally caught up with me, almost.  Anyway, in preparation for it’s imminent arrival I felt compelled to make some decorations, contrary to my usual ‘bah humbug!’ approach to Christmas!!

Actually, it wasn’t just me, Jolene started it with these rather pretty little crocheted stars …

… it’s while she was making these that she tossed a bag of felt offcuts in my general direction and told me to stop being ‘lazy’ and to ‘get on with something’ …

… I was …

… I was drinking tea …

… it’s important!

I spent a few minutes rummaging, looking at the various shapes available, before coming across some bendy triangles.  It wasn’t a huge leap to come up with the trees above.

I’m hoping to get some pine cones done up in time for Christmas, maybe as a table decoration or maybe as a few more hangers for the tree, whatever I do I’ll be sure to share them here.

Mushroom bowls in blue – reworked

Regular readers may well recall these bowls in their original form, you can see them here.  As then they were blue, and they are finished with varnish.  What is different is the depth of the ’sub-coat’ I apply to these pieces, the method in which the paint was applied and finally the varnish used is a much tougher and much higher gloss variety.

In all honesty I was never satisfied with the bowls, despite the compliments (thanks!), and when I brought them out at one of our recent craft fayres I was compelled to immediately re-wrap them and return them to the crate from whence they came!

With everything that’s been going on of late I struggled to get them finished, but the final coat of varnish is dry and we even managed a wee drop of winter sunshine to get some piccies taken … sunshine makes me happy!  Anyway, here are the bowls:

click the images for full-view

Mushroom bowls in blue ~ another set of three

This is the second set of bowls I’ve made along the mushroom lines, of course mushrooms don’t traditionally come in shades of blue, but then traditionally bowls don’t come in the form of mushrooms.  I have been keen to experiment with colour and whilst I was initially sceptical about making these blue they are beginning to grow on me … not that I have some sort of fungal infection you understand, it’s just that I’m coming to like the bowls!

These bowls are made on the same moulds as the previous set, and despite this you can readily see that the bowls themselves are rather different from one another not only in colour but also in shape and weight.  The bowls shown here have a much lighter or finer finish to them than their predecessors, although each is as robust as the other, I was mildly concerned that the blue bowls would be rather flimsy so I was pleased to discover that the finish I use gives a rigidity to the edges that you might not otherwise expect.

please click on images to see a larger image

I have one final set of these in the pipeline, in fact, I’ve already removed them from their moulds and the moulds are no more.

Paper pottery – a little red bowl

It’s been quite some time since I did any paper pottery and it was something i was pleased to get back to a two or three weeks ago when I decided I needed a rest from the ‘plant pokes’ I’d been working on.  The piece shown here is the first of nine pieces I’ve been working on, this one is the most individual of the set and I’ll presenting a couple of simple ’spring bowls’ in a few days time as well and two sets of three ‘mushroom bowls’ … those however are for later.

I’m relatively pleased with the way this has turned out, especially since it is the first I’ve done in some time, the simple colour scheme is probably borne of an abstract ‘ladybird bowl’ that sits in our window sill and was one of the first pieces I made a few years ago.  I suspect though that a more immediate influence has been the scenes of autumn that have been surrounding us for the last month or so, lots of reds, oranges, yellows and browns this year.  Very nice.

… and a couple of fun photo’s …

… obviously when i say, ‘fun’, I mean it in the, ‘I need to get out more’ sense!

In terms of uses for such a bowl, well it is largely decorative, although we use bowls like this for keeping nick-nacks and keys in and so on