To Make A Book

I don't know about you, but I like things; I like things that remind of adventures I had and places I've gone. Thus, I have managed to accumulate a good size pile of memorabilia. It has everything from the script for my scene in Yueltide last year, to dozens of postcards from places I've been, to an awesome card a friend gave me last year on my birthday. The only problem is, it's all sitting in a box in my closet. That's great and all, but it would be nice if I actually had some place to put it.

So, with that in mind, my most recent projects has been to make a scrapbook with it all. At first, I was planning on just going to the store, buying some sort of scrapbook/journal/notebook to put them in. But, after tons of searching, I only found one book I liked, and it was WAY too expensive.

However, that could not deter me. I decided instead to actually make the scrapbook itself. It couldn't be THAT hard, right? I did a little research on Google about making books, and found that there were some pretty easy ways to do it. So, I grabbed my supplies, which included:

carboard
fabric
cardstock
unlined white paper
thread
scissors
and glue......lot's of glue.

And here's how I did it.

First, I measured and cut my covers out of carboard. Then, I cut out enough fabric to cover the inside and outside of both covers. I chose to put a yellow on the inside, and a red on the outside, as well as appilque a bird on the front cover. Then, I glued the inside fabric on, then the outside:

Next, I took my cardstock, and made them into signatures (a signature is a section of pages joined together). The easiest way to make a signature is to take two (or more) pieces of paper, lay them on top of each other, and fold in half length-wise; you then have a signature with four pages in it.

Since I couldn't fold my cardstock and still have it be big enough, I instead took two pieces of cardstock and two 1 1/4 inch strips of paper

And used the strips to connect the two piece of cardstock by gluing one on each side of the seam:

Then, that one large piece can be folded to create a signature:

I did that with my whole stack:

Then I measured, poked holes along the folds, and folded all the signatures:

And then I punched holes in my covers:

Then, using the coptic stitch method of binding, I stitched the covers and signatures together. Hole by hole, signature by signature:

Until finally, I had stitched everything together:

And that was the last step. So now I have a lovely, homemade, inexpensive scrapbook:

Now it sits on my table, just waiting to be filled with all my little paper memories!