Another Book and a Solution

When I cut the covers for this Celtic Weave Journal, I had an approximately 7 inch wide strip of the handmade paper left, enough I hoped that I could make a smaller Celtic Weave Journal for myself. That was near the end of August last year, and yes, I'd left it out on the worktable along with instructions, signature paper, needles and linen thread thinking I would get to it long before now. It is the last thing I need to work on to clear enough space to get started on the overdue baby quilt. The strip is actually not long enough to make front and back covers in the same manner as in the original book, but over the months I had an epiphany; I could make the covers like in the Butterfly Binding where the folded in side that will be between signatures is narrow instead of having to be as wide as the front of the cover. Now to decide just how that will work, what the width of the folds and ultimate size of signatures would be. Here I am experimenting with that by folding a piece of copy paper in various ways.

The paper I wanted to use is a 24 lb Ivory "Granite" Specialty paper by Southworth (bought on extreme markdown at Staples). The size paper I need to turn into my signatures is approximately 10 x 7 inches, preferably short grain since it will be folded in half to make 5 x 7 signatures. But normal 8-1/2 x 11 paper is long grain, meaning it folds with ease along its length, not so much crosswise. But 24 lb paper is relatively thin and I've folded similar against the grain to make signatures without much problem. I'd also been toying with the idea of printing lines on the pages, starting to think of how I could create a line document to print within the size of the pages once trimmed. I don't always know how I will use the books I make, but when I do have a particular use in mind, it motivates me even more. So as I mused, I realized this would make a great replacement book for one nearly full that I use for recording poems and quotations. Starting to get excited! More musings as I walk (where I do some of my best problem solving) about how to get lines printed since that use for the book really does require them, when I remembered a line pdf supplied by the book club. I checked and, since I have to trim down these pages anyway, I can make it work. There's my stack of printed pages ready to trim and fold into my signatures.

Frankly, there was a lot of puttering going on last week before I got busy on the book. I've been reticent to tackle the stack of fabrics on the ironing board but really they must go if I'm to work on a quilt, As I peeled them back to reveal so many beautiful fat quarters I've dyed, I knew why they had ended up on the floor. I didn't want to fold any of them up (I've had issues in the past getting creases out of fabric that has been folded and stored one on top of the other) and even if I did, I didn't really know how to "file" them. Then another epiphany: they could easily be clipped to hangers and remain flat. I've done it before and can't imagine why that hadn't occurred to me earlier.

There were also big yardage of Stonehenge fabrics I'd bought for a particular project, again, wanting to leave them as flat as possible because I was using such large pieces in work, and might well use them in other art quilts as they are the kind of thing that worked well with my nature pieces. But that project is long done, and I can't imagine any project that will call for them soon so I did do a fold in half so they would fit in the wire cubes where my batiks and hand-dyes reside. Next layer had some really small pieces (on the left of the ironing board) that I think came from friend Judi's stash - again I probably didn't want to fold them up and hide them away and didn't really know how to logically file them in the space I had anyway. Still have to figure that out, but with just a few more fat quarters to hang, I'm well on my way to having a functional ironing board again and a little more organizing complete.