Home made faux leather notebook

Hello everyone and wonderful to have you visiting. Hope you are having a good week. Today I am sharing another faux leather notebook with you. I created this for Spellbinders Paperarts as one of their International Blog Ambassadors.

This notebook, unlike my last one, for which I just made the cover, was made completely from scratch. I plan to make quite a few of these to give away to friends.

Instructions on how to make something similar, can be found HERE.  Info on how to make the inside pages can be found HERE.
For my version, these were the products I used:
 Valiant Honour die set
Persian Splendor 3D M-Bossabilities folder

I also used a piece of Kraft card, Glycerin, some white card, Cartridge paper, some charms and a piece of fabric, plus some basic craft items, like Mod Podge, Glue and Seal (glossy), Distress Inks Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain, a needle and strong thread, some gilding wax (I used Treasure Gold White Fire) a heat tool etc.

I started by cutting a piece of Kraft card to 5 x 7", prepared it in the way described in the video, by spraying with water mixed with Glycerin a few times, crumpling it, spraying again and crumpling once more. I then dried it with my heat tool and then embossed it with the Persian Splendor embossing folder.

Next I  swiped Vintage Photo Distress Ink all over it and spritzed some water to make it run a bit. This was followed by inking it further with an ink blending tool.. Below you can see the difference between the first and the second step of inking.

Starting to look a bit like leather already. Now to add some more interest I cut these pieces with the Valiant Honor die set.

As you can see, the pieces on the left were treated with the same faux leather technique after they were cut.

Time to put the notebook together. I folded the cover in half, cut 9 pieces of Cartridge paper to 6 x 4 3/8" to create 3 signatures. Then I covered the inside of the cover with a piece of fabric. I used Mod Podge to glue it to the cover and trimmed and rounded the edges:

Here you can see the fabric all glued on.

And here is the faux leather side, after I had covered it with Glue and Seal to give it that shiny leather look.
Next I pierced the holes for the binding as described in the video. Obviously there are many different binding techniques, so there are many ways you could do this.

Being me I pretty much eyeballed it, - I am not the neatest worker as you can see, but to be honest, this was my very first attempt at book binding, - so,embrace imperfection (yet again....)

Here it is, with the signatures all stitched in

And this is what the spine now looked like from the outside:

And closed up

And with the inside of the cover showing:

Alright, now for the decoration: I used the two extra brown bits to become like straps and glued them around the spine. I stamped and coloured a little butterfly and placed it on the label. Some of the raised bits were high lighted with some gilding wax first.

I added some charms to the spine still and that was it.

Hope you like my little notebook, thank you so much for visiting and I hope you will have some time to be creative yourself!