Ten Journals

Well, I did it. In just four days actually, I made ten journals. On Wednesday I got the request from a local college; they want to give the journals to some award winners at their graduation. So the coordinator dropped by and looked at all the books I had and looked at all the leather and picked out what she wanted. And they would need to have them all ready by Monday.

Since they are all the same size and the same style of binding, I was able to save some time by doing several things at once. They are all 8.5x5.5 with 320 pages.

The first day, I folded and ripped enough paper for all the books and then cut all the leather for the covers. So after that, it was really just a matter of assembly. And I did finish one book entirely the first day. This is how things looked that night:


I was expecting it to be a high pressure situation and initially thought I might need to cancel Father's Day! But I was finished all the books on Saturday night. And apparently they aren't going to be picked up until Tuesday (rather than Monday) so I had truckloads of time.

These books have some little features that I haven't done before. All the straps are attached on the back through a loop - I usually just cut slits in the cover. But also, the first page of each book is a sheet of parchment style paper since they will be writing something on it before the books are presented to the award winners. The rest of the pages are plain white paper. Also, I usually attach a tag to my books on a little string, but I don't think they will want little tags flapping around so I printed my name and info on the last page.



Phew!