Handbound Scrap Paper Fabric Covered Journal

It’s no secret if you've been following this blog for a while that I always have a lot of scrap paper around. I do a lot of painting and end up with either pieces I don’t like or cut offs from pieces I liked, but wanted smaller. It ends up piling up in a box (or outside a box) and I need to do something with it. I decided, this time, I would make a journal, or sketchbook, with it. I also had some scrap fabric that I’d also painted and never got around to using, so I thought I’d combine the two, and make the journal with a soft fabric cover.

In this example, I’ve just used the paper I had lying around. I didn’t bother cutting it down neatly; I just ripped them to roughly the right size to fit the piece of fabric.

The fabric I am using has been painted with acrylic inks / watered down acrylic paint, which gives a good coverage of colour, but also makes the fabric stiffer. I thought this might help give the journal a little bit more rigidity (but it doesn’t actually make all that much difference).

I decided a quick way of making it would be to bind the cover into the signatures. I’m not sure if the stitch I’ve used has a technical name, because I just made it up as I went along.

I folded the papers into signatures and make four holes. I started on the outside, through the cover and into the first signature, and then in and out through the holes of the signature and cover. When I came out of the final hole, I made a small stitch across, through the cover, and picked up the next signature. I then repeated this until I’d attached all the signatures together.

It does get a little tricky if, like me, you are using different weight papers, because the space you need to allow for the signature to sit comfortably will alter. I didn’t pay too much attention to this while binding, so it isn’t vitally important, but it is something to think about.

I really liked this method, because it was so easy, and ended up making two books.

I’ve discovered that having scrap paper pages is really useful when journaling, because it gets over that initial fear of being faced with a blank page and not knowing how to start. I've started using one of the books I made in this example to do Rae Missigman’s Art Marks 30 Day Challenge, but I started it a bit late and will have to share my results with you another week.