Another day, another journal construction.
It's a question of binding, actually. I love all the variety of binding stitches in my new book and I want to try many of them, but I don't need a new journal (or one anytime soon AT ALL). I could, I suppose, just get some heavy stock paper and practice the stitches on scraps and build up a little sampler that way.
But that doesn't interest me. As you will see, part of what I like is the feel of constructing a book. I love putting the pieces together with the stitches just the best part of the whole process, but part of a process, not an isolated event. I know there is a great great deal to explore about book binding on a meta level - the meaning and implications of a structured book, but really, I'm happy to leave that mostly to people like Keith Smith who clearly have fun deconstructing bookiness.
I do like to dangle my toe in those waters, however, so I will challenge myself as I go on, bit by bit, exploring the ideas of my journals.
This one is constructed from left over and odd bits and in it's way, it's an homage to MAM (Mary Ann Moss). The cover is a bit of cardboard that I used as scrap and screen while spray painting in the fall (when I took her older Stitched and Stenciled class). I knew I would be okay covering up big pieces of it with binding tape. Inside, it has a tiny bit of drawing paper left over from some other projects, but mostly it's sliced up maps and security envelopes. I stitched on a pocket in the front and a bigger one in the back to hold notes and ... whatever. I could have added more details but given my itch to get to the needle and thread part, I'm leaving it as it is. I know it will have tabs at some point, but they can be glued on or stapled. I played with the hole scrap idea in her Remains of the Day class.
I guess all that's missing is her Full Tilt Boogie class, but I'm not breaking out any photo albums any time soon, and besides, the real point is to fully explore the material you have on hand, which I AM doing.
Here's the inside front cover and first signatures before I started on the spine. The pocket is on the reverse side of the mailing label.

I wanted to show a detail of the holes. With this, because it has multiple layers of duct tape, I wanted to try to use my awl instead of the japanese screw punch. I started out that way, but since my end boards were so flimsy, I found holding it to push the awl through was too difficult without chewing up the end boards. So I switched to the Japanese punch.

You can see the punched ones - so beautifully round and even. You can also see a couple that just had the awl - how tiny they are - the tape kept closing up around the hole. With the Japanese punch, it actually cuts the material away leaving the hole. My punch came with a big range of hole sizes, this was the smallest, 1.0 mm, and it has been fine for everything I've wanted to do, including the bindings with multiple strands through one hole. Maybe my needle is small enough to compensate for the added girth of extra thread in a complex binding.
Anyway, this ended up being the hardest prep I've had to do. I used the awl several times on each hole before going to the punch and then the punch even had a hard time getting through all the layers. In the end, I made the mistake of not cleaning out the punch as I went along, and the little bits of holes, with their gummy edges, ended up jamming up the punch. I had to take a few minutes and clean out the channel that the center bits accumulated in.

Each of those tiny discs was from a hole. This is what dropped out when I finally turned my punch over to clear it. What you don't see is a wad that accumulated inside the punch tip and which I had to clean out with a sharp needle. I've never been good about taking care of tools, and it's moments like this that make me aware of the wisdom of doing so.

Here's the cover with the signatures inside before binding. That's the spray paint cardboard, and then I used some bad orange tape I have on the inside and white on the outside for the spine. Because the orange tape isn't sticky enough, I added the black damask tape. In the end I actually had to sew the ends of the orange because it was bugging me how it kept releasing and bubbling up.

I'm not sure you can get a sense from the photo, but I also love the texture of the spray paint. I just love how it feels. I love all the different textures on the cover. The slick tape, the bookcloth tape, the stitches and the spray paint. Closing my eyes I can feel all that as I hold it in my hand.

Here are a selection of the papers inside. I put each half of a signature in a paper clip for handling purposes as I stitched the binding. Below is another view with more of the maps visible.

Again I liked the texture element of the different pages, the cut and raw edges, the crinkles. But later when I was sewing, I could see that the think papers were more delicate and prone to rip than the last paper I used for this binding (which was heavier drawing paper).
Tomorrow I'll show the stitches. They're explained in Mary Ann Moss's class Ticket to Venice, but also in a Keith Smith book on non-adhesive bindings (I think the 2,3,&4 section binding book).