Tote Intimidation

Apologies for the very out of focus photo. Right side trimmed, ruler placed to trim the left side.

This happens to me more often than I like to admit. I decide on a project, excitement builds as I get out pattern, fabric, whatever, and then at the first or so decision to be made, I freeze. A simple project turns into something I can't face because for a variety of reasons, I can't take the first step. That's a bit of what happened with my idea to turn the antique quilt remnant into a tote bag. As I stood assessing what I had to work with, I eventually would have to make some cuts, and there'd be no going back after that. So many questions I couldn't answer at the moment shot through my mind. But as the weeks went on and I kept going back into the studio to stare at it, I continued to think about those questions and the first cuts, and worked out answers so I could proceed. Folding the piece in half as it would be in the finished tote, I checked where my limits were on each side (since the piece was not perfectly squared up) and chose to make those border buds my guide two up, two down.

My only question as I placed the ruler for the trim on the left side was, will this leave enough for straps. It did, perfectly. Did it pain me to cut through the applique flower? Yes, a bit. But that was part of what intimidated me about working with this remnant, and I soon got over it.

I had a better piece with that same flower on it that was perfect to make a pocket out of. The top would need to be bound though, along with one side of the tote top - the other side had the original binding still intact. I had the perfect white muslin in my stash that I folded like commercial bias tape and could stitch down in one pass.

Since all these pieces are quilted, I opted for my machine's buttonhole (or is that blanket stitch?) setting to both sew the pocket in place and edge-finish the straps. Key to remember is that this tote will not get heavy use. I found a subtle variegated blue thread in my stash of King Tut cotton threads very similar in color to the blue applique pieces. 

The pocket fills in an open space on this side and works better than if I tried to just stitch the flower onto it. Trust me, I did try to make it fit while it still had its curved stem in place, but I couldn't make it work. Fine - pocket it is and the stem got trimmed away. It couldn't be centered because I didn't want to overlap the leaves on either side. Still, I love the way this looks.

I decided against lining this, again because it's a quilted piece and won't get heavy use as well as because of that one edge that was already bound. I realized I could sew the sides up using a French seaming technique that would encase the raw edges while also giving some heft to the sides. I decided I had enough room to sew across the bottom ends to form a box at the base.

Still a bit flimsy as totes go, but I'd noticed on the Staples promotional bag I'm keeping my downstairs sweater knitting in that it had binding sewn over the side and bottom creases which I think helps hold it up. Hmmm . . . I decided to do something similar by sewing a little pintuck over my edges. 

It does help, not as much as I'd hoped but I still think it was a good move. 

On the flip side from the pocket side, I suddenly saw another gap that could be filled with a remaining applique piece. This one was cut with one side of original binding and boy, did I want to make it another pocket.

Try as I may, I could not find a way to sew it anywhere keeping its pocket shape. Regretfully, I faced facts and trimmed it down, leaving a small allowance of the white background it was sewn to in order to use a zig zag stitch to attach it without stitching on the actual applique. Almost looks like it was always there. Only thing left to do was sew on the straps, which were amazingly the right length just as they were trimmed off the remnant.

Shipping bag in background, quilted tote much better

Now for the test run. My Autumn Wave sweater yarn has remained in it's original tyvek shipping package and I've been anxious to get it transferred to a more suitable bag. Perfect!

And that pocket sewn to the outside is just the right size to hold needles and any other small items. My "new" tote bag may be a little tired and worn in places but so am I - lol. A week's worth of work well worth the time spent. I still can't believe that the person who gave me this remnant didn't think it was very well done. The more I worked with it, the more I admired the workmanship.

This is all that was left over. There are still a few pieces I couldn't find a place for on the tote that I'm loath to toss out. I'm thinking maybe I can cobble together a small accessory bag or something. Waste not, want not . . .

 

Patience

This quotation, found here on Austin Kleon's Tumblr, seemed an appropriate follow-up to my last post about free may not cost you money but it does cost you time:

“I don’t want more, I want less. I want to have less, so I will have more time to devote to this gift that I have. Because in the final analysis, the only thing that we have that is not renewable is our life. When I am dead, they will still make money. My time, I have decided, is more important. To claim my time to do what I want to do in that time.”

—Amos Kennedy, Jr.

After posting, I hoped readers would not think I fancied myself above or not in need of more information at all. No, I have several blogs I follow, like Austin's, where I find much that is thought provoking and sometimes, useful quotations I'm not seeing elsewhere. As I worked on my current book project (part of my slow cleaning off of my work table), this post on The Principles of Patience popped up on Austin's Tumblr. It's short and I give you its bullet points as a teaser, hoping you will follow the link and read the explanation under each one. They all seemed to apply to my current project.

“Embrace radical incrementalism.”

First let me say, making books leads to as much leftover bits and pieces too good to throw out but sometimes head scratchers to figure out what to do with as making quilts. After finishing the last leather book, I had 8 perfectly good signatures from the bottom half of the paper I was using left over. Shorter than the signatures for the long stitch link stitch leather book but still a decent height for another leather book I wanted to try. I cut a piece from the smooth leather bomber jacket had for 99 cents, fused a heavier batik to it with Steam-A-Seam (hoping it would prevent fraying along the edges which Heat and Bond did not do), chose the handspun hemp thread I'd used in a Japanese stab stitch book, punched holes in the spine and started sewing in the signatures.

This is supposed to be one of those easy and relatively quick books to make, and with the signatures already cut and pressed, I should have been able to finish it in a couple of days. But instead, I found myself doing small bits at a time, stretched over an entire week. Working incrementally. After the first signature was sewn in and I had the hang of doing the "packing" around each long stitch, I moved my materials to my office so I could do that meditative wrapping of the thread while watching, or at least listening to, videos on my computer. I think I did that for 3 days before all five signatures were sewn in.

As a side note, I had to laugh when listening to an interview with a bookmaker while I worked on the covers. She had attended some sort of class herself where she was introduced to the idea of "stacking" which I realized is just a new-fangled term for multi-tasking and was actually exactly what I was doing at the moment. In other words, find another thing you can do while involved in something else - say, do some sketching while watching tv (her example). Lordy, I've been "stacking" for all my life! 

“Develop a taste for having problems.”

Well yeah, anyone who has sewn or quilted or done any kind of craft or art should be familiar with running into problems as one works through a project. In fact, I can remember a few times when things went flawlessly and quickly and it absolutely unnerved me I was so used to issues cropping up. As you can see, I was incorporating seams into the cover in a different way from the first leather book, not stopping to think that by centering a seam horizontally, it would become a problem when I started punching sewing holes and adding a closure. Too late now - forge ahead.

But that was minor compared with what I discovered when I sewed the last signature in and closed the book. The spine rounded pushing the signatures with it to make them uneven and not what was supposed to happen. The spacing between long stitch stitches was too wide (or the signatures could have been fatter). The whole structure was unstable and wonky.

And the first and last long stitch was visible on the front and back. I'd have to come up with a solution. Oh yes, I definitely have a taste for having problems! And for the most part, I am a patient person, not that interested in immediate gratification, so bumping up against issues that slow me down become welcome challenges. But there IS a limit to my patience!

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.”  

So here we go, analyzing the problem to determine its cause and how it might be fixed. I had used 5 of the 8 signatures instead 4 as shown in the directions because I wanted the remainder for yet another kind of leather book calling for 3 signatures. I placed the 3 between the sewn-in signatures to see if adding more would fix the problem.

Even just the 3 showed that, if I could figure out a way of adding a signature between the ones already attached, my book should behave as it's supposed to.

But adding with more long stitches with packing won't work - just not enough room between the stitches already there. I've been muddling options for days, as well as trying to work out how to attach some kind of wrap for a closure (that dang center seam!) and may have hit upon something (which hopefully won't leave me with even more unused signatures). Whatever I choose, it will take me from just following a set of directions into original territory for this binding. Originality from unoriginality. 

If you are interested in giving this book a try, the instructions are free over on Ali Manning's Vintage Page Designs website here.  And video instructions are here.

Sketchbook Revival and a New Sketchbook

Handmade journal modeled on the purchased one on the left

When the e-mail arrived announcing this year's version of Sketchbook Revival, my first thought was to sigh. I still feel like I have so many things I am frantically trying to catch up on; do I really want to commit chunks of time for 13 or so days watching videos and doing exercises in a sketchbook? But I had to admit that I enjoyed the information and discipline learned from last year's immersion so opted in, knowing I could skip what wasn't helpful or things I already knew, and take advantage of whatever new info from a wide range of instructors might be presented, all for free. One small catch of course. The Strathmore multi-media Visual Journal that I used last year got pretty much filled and my many other journals wouldn't quite fit the bill. Am I going to have to order one, I asked, sighing once more. Heck no! Of course, I could make my own while trying out a new binding from my Handmade Book Club. Yup, kill two birds with one stone.

I studied that commercial journal that had served so well for last year's lessons and decided it would be my model in terms of kind of paper and size. Not needing it to be any more sturdy than for use here at home, I decided to reprise my cereal box "boards" covered with tissue paper. Boy, was I excited when I found the teal tissue paper and the beautiful printed one. Not enough of the teal to do two layers scrunched and I didn't really want to add a lot of texture anyway. So after gessoing the boxes, only one layer of tissue paper was smoothed into place and it was enough. The smoothing wasn't perfect so there's a bit of wrinkling here and there but basically, not much texture. The teal became the outside of the covers while the print became the endpaper on the inside. Taking a cue from a tutorial on how to use paper napkins on substrate, I used acrylic varnish to cover both sides of the board to give the tissue paper extra protection. What I have on hand is high gloss, which probably would not have been my first choice, but it actually mimics the gloss of the commercial journal covers.

I checked my paper supply because yes, I'm starting to have a stash of it, and had a couple of choices in multi-media paper. The least waste when cutting down to size would be in using a pad of large sheets where I could get 4 pages out of each sheet. Rather than cut, I tore the pages to size which left rough edges (deckles) and I decided there was no point in trimming them smooth once they were stacked and folded into signatures. These four signatures would have given me about the same number of pages as in the Strathmore journal but at the last minute I decided to add four more signatures to accommodate the binding stitching I'd be doing. Besides, all that tearing was a bit therapeutic considering all the closures and stay at home recommendations finally descending on my little community.

Once the boards dried and they, along with the signatures, spent some time under heavy books, everything got their sewing holes punched, and I set up on the small table where my laptop resides so I could follow the video tutorial on what the teacher was calling the dragonfly stitch.

That dragonfly stitch - I'm not the only one that struggled with it. I was wishing we'd added the back cover first since I did a much better job on it than I did the front cover. Just look at the beautiful printed tissue paper! It makes my heart sing when I see it.

Once the front cover was on, the rest of the signatures went on much faster than I anticipated and quite easily. On each end is a kettle stitch which is what we used on the first books - 2 and 4 needle coptic binding - and supposedly is a sturdier stitch than the chain stitches in the middle which are more what I think of a coptic binding looking like, all done with a single needle.  If you look closely along the edge of the top board, you will notice a slight buckle. I had the same thing appear on my other cereal box board book. I think it's a failure to get the paste evening distributed and all the way out to the edge before putting to two pieces and their cardstock stiffener together. Recycling is a nice idea, but I may have to rethink using these boxes in the future.

I think my stitches got tighter with each signature I added so the book doesn't close totally flat. But flat enough for my purposes. This is a working sketchbook, not meant to be fancy although those deckle edges make it a little bit so.

I nearly used the French Link binding again because I know for a fact how nice and flat the pages all open and that is pretty important in a sketchbook like this. However, I'm still catching up on binding tutorials so I didn't really want to repeat a binding yet, and I'm not sure how rugged that French Link would turn out to be over time. Decided to trust that this Dragonfly Stitch binding, essentially a coptic stitch binding, would lie just as flat. And it does! The dark line down the middle is the stitching thread in the center of the signature, a grey thread which was the only color of the appropriate weight of thread I had on hand. Yes, if I keep this up, I will no doubt be accumulating a different kind of thread stash from the quilting one I already have.

And in spite of feeling like my stitches got tighter as I went along, the spacing between signatures is fairly consistent and not too much of a gap. I am very pleased.  The book, by the way, measures 8 by 5-1/2 inches.

It's a bit exciting to be starting this year's Revival in this book I made myself, covers in my favorite color. Better get cracking and see if it really works. The videos started on Monday and I have yet to watch one.

It's Done

I've put the finishing touches on my recycle bookbinding challenge at long last. Frankly, my interest was waning and I am SO tired of dragonflies that I don't want to see another one for a long time! Talk about a learning experience though. So many things I should have thought through before forging ahead with parts of it. Things I discovered about pens and adhesives through trial and error. Overall, it did not turn out too badly. But I really didn't think I'd be fiddling with it for so many months. This first post about it from last May sets the scene: Evolution of a "Simple" Project. And the rest of this post is photos of each page in all their recycled/upcycled glory - packing paper, paper made from junk mail, used teabags, images from catalogs, magazines, tissue and wrapping paper, and fabric, security envelop patterns, salvaged cording and crewel yarn, and of course, the cover which was the start of it all, made from a shopping bag. Click on any photo for a larger view. Apologies for the few that are out of focus.

If you have questions about process, see these additional posts:

https://idahobeautyquilts.blogspot.com/2018/08/finding-what-is-doable.html

https://idahobeautyquilts.blogspot.com/2018/08/update-on-progress.html

https://idahobeautyquilts.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-million-things-to-consider.html

https://idahobeautyquilts.blogspot.com/2018/11/test-test-test.html

https://idahobeautyquilts.blogspot.com/2018/12/wrapping-up-year.html