Six journals

When I was preparing for the local craft market that I mentioned previously, I prepared the signatures and the covers for these six journals. I had the covers made, pressed, dried, and the signatures were folded and pressed and I took them with me to the sale to work on if there was any downtime. I got only two of them bound while I was there, each are sewn with four rows of chain stitches, or the small-c-coptic sewings. Now I've finished the others and added the buttons and ribbons. They are now all available on Etsy too.

Celebrating Earth Day (wtih free stuff)!

April 22nd is Earth Day! In recognition of Earth Day, I am giving away free eco-friendly journals with any order from my Etsy or Artfire shops for the rest of this week (so, until midnight on Friday, April 23rd). Eco-friendly journals are ones that I have made entirely with materials that would have been otherwise destined for landfill.

There are actually two ways you could win something from me:
1. Any purchase from MyHandboundBooks.Etsy.com or MyhandboundBooks.Artfire.com will receive a free eco-book automatically!
2. Leave a comment here telling me what you are doing to celebrate Earth Day. I'll randomly select one person's comment to win an eco-notebook too! (Make sure you leave your email address or link to contact information so that I can contact you if you win!)
Edit April 24: This giveaway is closed.

The winner!
Congratulations to Pegg, the winner of my Earth Day giveaway! I had 15 comments to pick from, and I used random.org to generate a random number and it picked 10, and Pegg was lucky commenter number 10! Thank you to everyone who left comments here telling me about Earth Day activities, and thanks to those who made purchases this week; they got free eco-books too.

Some examples of my eco-friendly books:

Halifax Crafter's Market - April 17 & 18

Attention local readers: the Halifax Crafters are having their Spring Fling Crafter's Market on April 17th and 18th!

I'll be there with my books, along with many many other very cool artisans.

Location:
Olympic Center, 2304 Hunter Street
(which is really the corner of Windsor and Cunard)

When:
Saturday & Sunday, April 17 & 18

Time:
11:00am to 6:00pm each day

Drop in and shop for your mother's day and father's day presents, graduation presents, gifts for new babies, early holiday shopping, whatever you need, it'll be there...

The Illustrated Accordion

During April, the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center is hosting an exhibit called "The Illustrated Accordion." They have also posted a virtual exhibit on Flickr so everyone can see the collection. For those of you in Michigan, maybe you can check it out in person at the KBAC Gallery.

Included in "The Illustrated Accordion" is this little accordion book that I made last Fall.


This is called "A Walk on the Beach" inspired by our family's trip to a beach that had an unexpected conclusion. The accordion is made with pockets to hold found objects: shell, feather, driftwood, etc. The first pocket includes a tiny book with a bit of text about the walk on the beach.

Several months ago, I mentioned that I was participating in a miniature book exchange and this accordion book was initially designed for that purpose. For our exchange, we need to make an edition of 6 and we send one to each person. I was really happy with this book so I made an edition of 10; copies are available on Etsy.