So the title explains it all really, hehe…
I’ve been reading the blog Lil’ Blue Boo by Ashley Hackshaw… partly for chicken stuff since Tim and Kelly got chickens recently and the whole family has been invested in their care and involved in the Building of The Chicken Coop, and can I just say… wot a saga… but also because I’ve found Ashley to be the most inspiring and creative lady! And I especially loved a little book she’d made recently, and it got me thinking again how I would like to make a book. Just yet another of those things that I’ve wanted to have a go at for years… I have a huge list, btw.
Anyway, her adorable little notebook got me revved up to actually take scissors to paper… I googled for how-to’s and found Lee (Crafty Loops)’s amazing tutorials on YouTube. I pretty much followed her method, with the exception that my own book is made entirely from scraps, rubbish, and leftover bits and bobs.
We have a whole lot of scrap paper in our house… old, partially filled notebooks, scrapbooks, graph paper and lecture pads from the children’s days at school etc; that I’ve kept just in case I ever need scrap paper. I semi-roughly cut stacks of various sorts… I went for sort-of neat but not perfectly neat, because I really like the imperfectly, imprecise handmade look in a book. Like Lee did in her demonstration book, I cut eight signatures with five pieces of paper each… which gives you eight little booklets of ten pages. Since you’re glueing the frontmost and backmost pages to the cover, this means I ended up with a little book of 78 pages in all…
For punching the stitching holes… I don’t have an awl and was too impatient to run out and buy one. However necessity is the mother of invention, as they say; and I found a dried up ballpoint pen actually works as a pretty good substitute… for backing I used a dried-up old foam squeegee block #whenhoardingpaysoff
For binding; I used a small scrap of bias-cut white linen, and for stitching I used a leather needle and cream-coloured Gutermann’s upholstery thread.
spine all glued up and drying… I used regular ol’ PVA glue
My cover is cut from a discarded cardboard box that I rescued from our recycling bin… I covered it with white paper first… this too was scrap actually! an un-needed page of a new pdf clothing pattern I recently printed. And made. And have not yet blogged, oops, I’m so lazy…
The final cover for my book is linen; this was a piece of indigo-dyed linen leftover from a natural dyeing workshop, run by Trudy Pollard. I attended the workshop with Nicki, Sue and Megan a few years ago. Long term readers of my blog may remember that I made this dress from the linen. I’ve kept the leftovers all this time! well, natural indigo is kinda precious and nigh on unavailable here, and I thought the scraps might come in handy one day. And they did!
Et voila!!
I’m so ridiculously pleased with my little blue book! And it was so much fun to make too… like being in kindergarten again! have no idea what I’m going to write in it yet.. maybe poetry? artsy doodles? a journal? or maybe a little sewing book, to keep track of fabrics and haberdashery requirements? So many options… I need more books, obviously 
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