Celebrating Autumn Journal

The Trans Canada Etsy Team issued an Autumn Challenge a while ago, and now all the entires are online for voting! So go over to the team blog (transcanadaetsyteam.blogspot.com) and vote for #11! or #13! er, I mean, go vote for your favorite!

This is my Autumn journal (#11 when you vote!)


I cut a circle out of the front cover to create an enclosed window. The back of the window is lined with a piece of real birch bark, and then a small red maple leaf was placed inside before I sealed it over with a plastic transparency sheet. The birch bark is from that tree in the campground where I camped this past summer and there were big pieces of bark peeling off so I brought a bit home with me. The little red maple leaf, I picked last Fall from a tree near my house and pressed in a big book all year.


The marbled paper on the covers is some that I hand marbled myself. There is also some handmade paper that I made, as the paste-down on the inside of each cover.


Of course this is also for sale in my Etsy shop.

My other submission for this challenge is this sheet of marbled paper - #13 when you vote!! (Also available on Etsy of course)


Vote here: transcanadaetsyteam.blogspot.com
And if you also leave a comment over there after you vote, there is a little giveaway for some lucky commenter (not here, over at the TCET blog!)

More Marbling

I did some marbling recently so I want to share some of the results. These ones are for sale on Etsy at MyMarbledPapers.

Cathedral


Spanish Wave


Diagonal stripes with antique spots


Stones


Free-form curl on a nonpareil


Free-form curl on stones

Got fun boxes?

Well, if you are the sort of person who saves boxes because you think they look really cool... then you could make them into journals...or even better, send me the boxes and I'll do it for you! Just recently, I made this batch of books for a friend who has a tendancy to accumulate and save boxes. Definitely some fun things going on here. You followin' me camera guy?


And another batch made from boxes that I had accumulated:


And really, if you have a box that you think I should convert into a book, let me know! Go to my Artfire shop and contact me that way. I've never met a box that I couldn't convert into a book!

An old printshop

During our brief travels this summer, we visited Sherbrooke Village which is an historic village, and it has a printery. I had visited this village when I was a kid, but I did not remember there being a printshop. This time, however, it was the most interesting shop in town (although a bindery would have been even better).

Sherbrooke Village is just a regular town really, and in the 1960s the town decided to turn itself into a museum. So all the historic homes and shops were restored to their 1800s state. And although it's primarily a tourist attraction, some of the buildings like the church and courthouse, which are part of the historic village, are also still used by the larger community of Sherbrooke. There is a simple wooden fence around the historic village and on the other side of the fence within arm's reach, is the modern town of Sherbrooke with exhaust fumes and ATMs and all that good stuff. So it is an interesting juxtaposition.

They have all the things you would expect to find in an historic village like a blacksmith, a schoolhouse, a post office, a jail, the doctor's home and office, a pharmacy, the potter's barn, etc. But as I said, the printshop was a little highlight so I thought I'd share some of the photos that I took.


Chandler and Price in action

Many drawers of type

My kid, who might have mixed up some type, but I'm not admitting anything...