See It Sunday : Likely Links

There is an interesting journal  project on this page ; it shows that lutradur is an ideal mixed media material.  The image above is a close up of an Artists Trading Card which features Lutradur on a base of mount board, and embellished with paint.

Try It Out Tuesday : Adding The Cover

If you remember from last Thursday's post, I had finished off the cover, and looked at a different way of attaching it.  The journals I am working with have soft covers, but good quality paper, so I wanted to make them a little more robust, and hopefully, much more attractive, so decided to make the cover a permanent feature of the journal.  I did that by putting a layer of fusible on the back of the cover.  I peeled off the backing and wrapped the cover round the book, fusible side down, exactly as I wanted it to sit, tucking the flaps in at either side.  I then put a piece of greaseproof paper over the cover to protect it, and pressed both sides with a warm iron (just follow the directions for your fusible if you're not sure).   I then opened the book, and did the same with the flaps, just to make sure they were securely attached.

Looking at the journal (above), I decided it was a little long, top and bottom, as it overlapped the edges of the book. For purely aesthetic reasons (the cover is strong enough to hold the book as it is, without any further change, I thought about how to change it.   I did not want to fold the flap in, as the corners would have been far too thick.  Instead, as the Lutradur won't fray, I cut a slit in the top cover and bottom cover, over the spine, opened the book and cut along the inside edge of the journal.  The slit in the spine area just made it easier to cut.  That produced a final book that looks like this:

I wanted a journal that suggested a garden...and here it is.  I hope you'll try this little project!  Share a photo with us if you do, and tell us what your theme was.  If enough journal photographs arrive, I'll create a separate page here on the blog to show them off!

We're going to stay with the theme of books for a while... if there is anything you would particularly like to see featured here, please let me know.

Try It Out Thursday : Journal Covers (Decoration)

On Tuesday's blog, we made the basic cover for a soft bound notebook.  Now, we're going on to embellish it a bit, before we cover the book itself.  The painted colours were quite strong, so I wanted something that would stand out.  And I started with a button, a lovely pink button, which I put in the middle of the cover and thought...yeah.. that's the centre for a flower.  Not any old flower, either, but a daisy.  So, I went to find some fabric, thinking that I really wanted something yellowy, and found some white fabric with an abstract daisy print (I bought it some time ago, and have never used it; it's now on the pile to be used sooner rather than later...). 

I cut a piece of the fabric roughly the same size as the front cover of the book, and ironed on some fusible.  I put the button roughly in the middle of the paper coated fabric, so that I could see the scale that the petals needed to be drawn at, and drew a freehand daisy shape onto it.  With each petal, I started at the button, and returned to the button, drawing round it slightly before making the next petal.  You might want to practice this on a piece of paper, first.When taking a photograph for the blog, I discovered that you couldn't make out the pattern, so inked it on with a marker pen.  This proved to be a mistake, as you will see. 

The original drawing, just using a ballpoint.

Inked in with marker pen for visibility.

AAARGH... See those blue marks?

 I had forgotten that I had been working on a soft surface (my ironing board).  As a result, when I used the ballpoint pen on the fusible backing paper, it had torn, slightly.  When I then inked up the design so you could see it, the ink travelled on the greaseproof paper, and got onto the cloth, mostly around the middle.  The button doesn't cover it enough, and it looks truly out of place.  Next time, I'll use a pencil for this task!  Right now, though, I need to think about what to do to camouflage the rogue marks. 

I fused the flower shape onto the front section of the cover, overlapping the petals at either side (if you click on the image directly above, you will be able to see the fold lines that indicate where the flap is on the right hand side, and the centre of the cover on the left.  That makes the design much livelier, as you will see in a moment.  I then stitched round the petals using straight stitch.  I did that to ensure that the stress of opening and closing the book would not unstick the flower.  I used straight stitch, instead of the zig zag stitch you might have expected because I like rough edge applique, but also because the flower shape is quite delicate; zig zag, even in white, would have detracted from the fresh look of the piece.  The stitching is barely noticeable, which for me, in this particular design, is what I was aiming for.

I then went on a hunt in my studios for something to camouflage the blue dots.  I found a small piece of scrap silk paper, which I had used on a hat project, and cut a freehand circle larger than the button.  That worked very nicely, and pulled the whole piece together.  We assume that mistakes are Bad Things; I prefer to look at them as opportunities...this certainly proved to be the case here.  I stitched the button to the silk paper circle, to create a single unit (much easier to handle than trying to add two separate elements at once, or separately), and then stitched the button in place.  Success!

Before I assembled the journal, which is now nearly finished (above), it struck me that I wanted to make the covers for these paper bound journals permanent.  The original covers are relatively flimsy, much less so than the Lutradur XL.  So, I devised a different way of finishing these journals, compared to the quick and easy version I have already showed you.   We'll look at that on Tuesday.  Meantime, happy sewing!

Try It Out Tuesday : Painted Book Cover (Background)

I thought that, this time, I would change the type of book I am covering.  This is a soft backed sketchbook, so I thought that this time, I would use Lutradur XL as the base for the cover.  It looks a bit like Pelmet Vilene, but is made in a different way, with no chemicals, and it doesn't give off dust when it is cut or worked with, which is basically why I prefer it.  Astonishingly, it is still semi transparent, despite its weight, though you really do need something very strong below it for it to be visible.  Since this is a book cover, however, I thought I would use paints on the cloth, something I rarely do with Lutradur, a change from the thinking last week.

I started out by cutting the XL to size.  I was working in the shed, and forgot to take a soft tape measure with me, so instead used a piece of scrap fabric to work out the size the cover needed to be, cutting it to size in each direction, and then laying the pieces onto the XL to show me where to cut.  It worked very nicely, and I got four covers from a metre wide strip of XL.  Before I started painting the XL, I folded it in half , and then wrapped it round the book, as I did before, so that I had a clear indication of which parts of the cover would be visible when it was closed.  This is really important if you're planning to print something onto the book cover; there's nothing more frustrating than finding that you have printed squint, or printed to one side, so that some of the printing is lost. As you can see from the image below, it does cause a bit of creasing on the XL itself, but that is neither here nor there once the paint is added.

As I said in the last post, I wanted to use the same technique as I have done in the past to suggest a garden; random colour.  My reason for doing this is fairly simple.  Making samples of things can result in you having lots of bits and pieces of work that don't fit in with anything else.  They are exactly that; samples.  Working within an existing body of work or theme can unite those different things together, so that you feel as if you really are achieving something.  It can also give you more ideas for working within your existing theme.

 XL has two distinct surfaces; I painted onto the shiner of the two. I added all the colours with the same brush, a stencil brush, trying to vary the marks I was making and the depth of the paint.  For reasons I will share later in the post, I needed all the paint to be wet at once, so I worked very quickly.

When the piece was complete, I then took a second piece of XL, and put it face down on the wet paint.  I stroked it gently, and found it moved slightly under my hands (this doesn't usually happen when you do this, particularly when working with paper).  I decided to encourage this movement, and ended up with lovely blurred colour on the main piece, and some interesting colour marks on the second.  If I had wanted more paint transferred from one piece to the other, I would have used a brayer (roller). 

I set the first piece aside to dry, and took the second piece.  I wanted to add some background colour to it, as there was just a bit more white than I like in the background.  So, I took a paintbrush that I had been using for something earlier in the day.  It had quite a lot of paint left on it, and I began to work it into the XL.  This technique is called dry brushing, and is a bit like adding a watercolour wash; as there is not all that much paint on the brush, it does alter the existing colours a little, but is most prominent on the white. If you have to put more paint onto your brush, as I did, add only a little, and try to rub the majority of it off onto greaseproof paper, as if you were stencilling; that way, you can use all the paint, but without having areas that are distinctly darker than others on the finished cloth.

The final result is shown below.  Now to think about embellishments for both of these pieces... but that is for Thursday's blog!  Which one do you prefer?

Try It Out Tuesday : A Simple Lutradur Journal Cover.

Well, simple was what I was after...and I think I've achieved it.  This is the kind of journal cover you can knock up quickly as a gift for someone.  I had a journal lying around, well, several, actually, having intended to make journal covers for my Etsy shop.  So, I took a small one, and, in a fit of enthusiasm, measured it for a cover.  I decided to have an approximate 2.5cm overlap front and back, so simply took a cloth tape measure, and, starting at the back, inserted it into the journal, allowing 2.5cm for the back flap, then measured around the book from back to front,finally adding on another 2.5cm for the upper flap.  Are you with me?  It looked like this... and gave me a measurement of 29.5cm.  Sorry, to those of us who work in inches; it's a lot easier to measure this kind of thing in centimetres...but you can see that that's roughly twelve inches.

Then, I measured top to bottom, finding that the book measured 15.5cm, so I added 1cm top and bottom, making a total of 17.5cm.  And then... I totally ignored the measurements, and did everything by eye.  Well, it's just not my thing, all this careful measuring... but for those of us who like working that way, what I should have done at this point, was to cut a bit of lutradur 100 or 130 to that size, and worked with it.  As it happened, I worked with a piece that was a bit bigger, as it was already coloured, and I thought it would make a good journal cover (we'll make another one from scratch on Thursday, and I'll try to stick to the measurements, okay?). 

So... I positioned my slightly too large cloth around the book, as if it was covering it.  That let me see just how the front and back would eventually look, and I positioned it carefully to maximise the impact of the pattern, trimming it as I did so.  This image was taken about half way through the process; I was able to cut away the nasty marks in the top right hand corner, as there was sufficient height in the piece to allow it.  I then carefully pressed the creases for the flaps, so that I could easily see them.

Now for some stitch.  I machine stitched the four corners down, and tried the fit out on the book.  Too neat.  So... I took it out and did it again, using a scant seam allowance of roughly a quarter inch (who says you shouldn't mix your measurement scales?).  I wouldn't have done that with a cloth that would fray, but it's fine on the heavier Lutradurs, which are strong enough to tolerate it, and which won't fray in any case.  Finally, I zigzagged along both long edges, making sure not to overlap the original stitching.

 It was at this point, I realised that I really should have measured... the flaps are too short in this version, about 1.5cm.  So, I used double sided tape to hold them in place; glue would have been just as good.  Remember that book covers are usually glued down, and there's nothing wrong with doing that.  
With hindsight, I'd have liked my inside flaps to be about 3.5 to 4cm...but that's for next time. 

This is an ideal process for trying out journal making with printed Lutradur that you might have lying around.  Next, we'll look at creating a themed journal cover from scratch.