Small Notebook for the Mini Album Makers challenge

Hello friends, hope you are well and happy and Happy May!
I just recently returned from a trip to Australia and before I left I made myself a small notebook to take along and today I want to share with you how I made it:

I made the cover following various faux leather tutorials on youtube.
For those of you, who are new to this technique, this is how you go about it:
You will need:
Good quality Kraft card
A spray bottle
A bottle of Glycerine ( cheaply available from chemists)
An embossing folder
Distress Inks in brown tones (I used Vintage Photo and Ground Espresso), and if you want to add patina highlights you will also need a patina coloured art crayon (I used a Cracked Pistachio Distress Crayon).
1. start by making a mix of one part glycerine to approx 5 parts water in your spraybottle.
2. Cut your craft card to the desired size to fit around your notebook.
3. Spray your glycerine mix all over your card and then rub it in with your fingers. Do this on both sides. When it is well soaked in, crumble your card into a ball and then flatten it out again. Repeat this process about 3 times, making new creases each time and then rub over the creases with your chosen ink pad colour. It should now look something like this:

4. Fold your card in half and dry emboss each side with the help of an embossing folder. (I used a Spellbinders 3D embossing folder, but any folder will do).

5. Rub over the raised bits with your inkpad again and then spray lightly with water to make the ink run slightly.
6. If you decide to add some patina highlights, rub over some raised bits with your crayon. I chose  also to add a little metal embellishment that I also gave the patina treatment, and with that the cover was pretty much done.

7. For my inside pages I chose to use simple note paper like this:

8. I chose the simplest, yet effective way of binding my pages together: Simply adhere the front of one folded page to the bottom of the next until you have the desired thickness.I would recomment using a glue runner or gluestick as wet glue would bubble thin papers like this too much.

9. Once you have you have your desired thickness of glued together pages, use some sports tape (again available from many chemists) to strengthen the spine of your pages and hold them all together. This is a trick I learnt from Birgit Koopsen who uses this binding method for her artjournal pages HERE is a link to a video where she shows exactly how to do it.
10. Now it's time to attach the cover to the pages: I simply folded my leather look cover around the inside pages and then glued the top page to the one side, and the bottom page to the other side. The final step was to cover those pages with some pretty design paper so that it is neat and firmly held in place..

The beauty of this way of binding a book is that there is absolutely no sewing involved and with thin writing paper like this there is no chance of the thread ripping the paper.

My little notebook is now filled with memories, notes and ideas.

Hope you like it, and if you ever want to create your own notebook, I highly recomment this method as it is really quick and easy to do.

Well, that's it for today's tutorial. We hope you will share your own books and ideas with us on the challenge blog, and meanwhile please take a peep at some of the albums my talented teamies have created and catch up on all the details of our challenge this month. Hope to see you there!

xxxxx

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!