Color Me Inspired

Now that I've gotten into the adult coloring book trend, I thought I'd try to make my finished pages into something pretty and/or useful. Inspiration came along with an order of water filters for the house, which the company packed with five and a half feet of this lovely, thick, pale orange paper:



I ironed the paper flat and cut it up into pages, and took one of my colored pages and the guide page from the Barcelona coloring book to use for the cover:



I made my cover by sewing together my colored page to the color guide page I'd printed out (backsides together on the inside):



After I sewed a signature of three pages to the cover I'd made, I had a nifty little notebook:



To make a larger version you can sew the pages between to colored and guide pages, like I did here:



I got three new notebooks out of the packing paper and my Barcelona colored pages:



Or, if you'd rather not get into any sewing or book-making, you can use your colored pages as view-binder cover inserts:



I purchased this gorgeous spider/write page from Kawanish, and used it as the cover for my writing schedule binder. What's cool about buying individual pages from Etsy artists is that they come as a download, and you can usually print out as many copies as you like for personal use.

Recycle X 5: Mini-Binder

For my fourth project with recycling cardboard I decided to make a mini-binder for some visual ephemera related to the Disechanted & Co. series. There were a couple of problems along the way (one stain never really dried, and I had trouble getting the duct tape on straight) so I need to repeat the project and work out a few bugs before I post directions for it.

In the meantime, here's a slideshow of how I worked on it from start to finish:

Pages

Can you turn driftwood, two by fours, cereal bags and coasters into journals? If you get the third issue of Pages magazine you can; those are just a few of the projects included in this Summer 2013 edition. There are also two articles on how to make journals you can wear on necklaces which look like fun; I'm definitely going to try my hand at both.

Over the last couple of years the evolution of journal-making as an art form has been fascinating to follow. Mixed media artists are bringing new materials, techniques and perspectives to the craft that are entirely unexpected, and taking the journal in all sorts of new directions. Pages does a great job in sampling some of the most interesting of these as well as presenting ideas I've seen nowhere else. As with previous issues the mag offers multiple projects with detailed instructions for bookmaking, covers and binding, inside pages and the art of journaling, and as always there are plenty of ways you can repurpose and upcycle materials to keep your projects green.

One of the articles in this issue, Boiled Books by Laura Ryan, involves combining botanical material with paper in a layered packet that you boil to transfer the natural dyes in the botanicals to the paper. You may remember I did something like this (admittedly on a much smaller scale) with my tea-dyed index card journal, and the results were very pleasing.

Laura's results are stunning:



Personally I can't wait to try her technique. One note of caution on this project: many plant materials like oleander can be highly toxic, so be sure whatever botanicals you use are safe before you handle them or toss them in the boiling water (and Laura makes quite a few suggestions of non-toxic organic materials you can safely use in the article.)

In the editors' picks section I noted one more thing I immediately wanted, this watercolor pocket field sketch box by Sakura. It's hard for me to travel with my watercolors, and this kit sounds ideal as a take-along. The brush in the kit contains a reservoir that you fill with water; if that really works and eliminates the need for a water dish that will make the kit super convenient for watercolorists who want to paint on the go.

You can usually find Pages on the magazine racks at most big chain booksellers, or order it online here in print or as a digital download here.