Bookbinding, leather bound gratitude journals

These were a set of journals that I made for christmas presents. I had some crappy leather, bought at a discount from deprova leather..cheap because it was crappy, one surface had a nasty texture, but the back surface was a lovely suede, it also had a nice edge, I cut the covers to take advantage of the raggedy edges of the leather, as  much as I could.

 I stained them pinkish with printer ink as it was thin enough to soak in, without clogging the texture of the suede or making it stiff.

 I glued some sari fabric on the back and then did a stitched binding, adding in a few scrapbooking pages for interest. I decorated the fronts of each one, slightly differently. They were time consuming, so only very close friends got one!

Art journal,

This was hand bound with coptic stitch, I used some stencils from Ed Roths new book, but most of the writing inside is freehanded, a combination of backgrounds, some linocut prints and scrapbooking papers. And some random images from the web.

I added some envelopes and skinny pages (so new pages can be stuck in) into the binding.

Gnome-y teeshirt

This is painted for a friend, for a personal craft swap. Its on the back and was just freehanded onto the fabric..and of course it got a spray of glitter once it was done!

musings on creativity

I live in ireland and we have bugger all in the way of craft shops. I am on holidays in Orlando at the moment and so have access to all the wonderful american craft shops and bookshops.

I have been in my element, spent a fortune on fabric!

My two loves are paper arts and sewing, I have been looking at a lot of books, magazines and articles on paper arts and while I hate hate hate the fact that so much of the wonderful papers and embellisments are unavailable to me, I think that on balance its a good thing. So much of what I have seen is very samey, people working with mass produced (not cheap!) embellishments, the work seems to become an assemblage of other peoples elements, I am not saying that its not creative, but maybe there is another step. To work with paint and glue and paper, make your own embellishments, rather than buying a 'set' from someone else.

What is creativity..to me, its about giving yourself permission to screw up, to fail, to create something that might not be perfect. I think everyone is creative. I think what stops us is the fear of failure.

What would you do if you werent afraid to fail.