The ink and paper I ordered still haven’t been delivered (they should’ve been here on Friday), so I’m sort of stuck for journalling. I’ve got pens a-plenty, but I’m really preferring working with a dip pen. Hrmph. So, I worked on some backgrounds. The first one is just plain old stamping, using a carved eraser and a wine cork with cheap acrylic craft paint.\r\n\r\n
The second one was less involved, but I think more interesting. I started with diluted blue acrylic paint. After it dried, I sloshed on some super diluted gesso. Because I was working on a slanted surface, the gesso ran all over the place, including onto the carpet. Yikes! So I grabbed my roll of paper towels to blot the mess, and noticed that they left lovely basket-weave lines in the blotted gesso. I like the pattern, and it should provide guidelines for writing. I can’t write level to save my life, so I’m happy. Yay for serendipity!
I also bound another book this morning. It’s small and chunky and terribly cute: 3 x 3 3/4 inches and 48 pages (12 signatures of 4 pages each), Coptic bound with linen thread. The pages are Cartiera Magnani hot press watercolor paper, which is yummy.
The covers are made from denim from an old pair of my jeans, cut twice as wide as the width of the pages and a little taller. I ran them through the wash cycle a couple of times so the edges would fray. I was careful to keep the original seams at the centers of the fabric pieces, so that when I folded them in half around the boards, the seams would be along the spine edges. I then glued them to the boards (actually, two pieces of watercolor paper, because I wanted flexible covers), weighted them, and let them dry overnight.
red paper boat 