Playing With Paper

This weekend I participated in the Paper Arts Festival in Newport, Oregon. This festival is an opportunity for people who enjoy working in paper arts to get together and learn from each other in a wonderful coastal setting. It is a fairly small gathering as these things go, and the people who come are ready to laugh and have a good time while they work on their projects. Over the weekend I learned how to make three new journals-journals which I will most likely never write in because so far I haven't written in one yet. They are far too pretty and too precious to mess up with print. I know, silly. Pictured at the top is the first journal that I made on Friday. It was fairly simple. We probably could have rushed and completed it in a half day, but we were more relaxed and took a full day to complete it. I put my own decorations on the cover and painted it with Mod Podge.

Saturday's journal demanded much more. There were so many steps. We glued several textures to the covers of the book, back and front, and then put Gesso over all of it. While this was drying, we cut and made pockets in pages, put Gesso on the pages, painted them and used the dry covers to stamp the pages with luminair paints. I felt like a kid playing in mud at times-what fun. When all the pages were finished we painted the covers. The final step was to bind the book. Writing about all this goes quickly, waiting for all this paint, glue and Gesso to dry took a lot of time. I felt like I was rushing to catch up all day long and I ended up taking this project back to my room to finish during the evening so that I could get it right. This will be a fun one to do several more times with friends so that I can think about it more. The finished product can be surprisingly beautiful, though it doesn't sound like it when I write about it.

On Sunday we made a wonderful leather journal. (Let me take a moment to clarify that there are more classes than just journal making classes. I just happen to like to make journals and gravitate toward those sessions. One could take classes in Coptic stitching, making jewelry applying many fun metalics to papers, fun decorative boxes, felt making, paper making, and much, much more.)

The leather journal was another all day task. We began by painting the outside pages for each signature with wonderful, colorful, water based paints. This gave our books some contrasting color. I designed my journal around a button that I had purchased in Sisters, Oregon the weekend before. So we painted, measured, made templates, punched holes in our leather, and stitched the leather together to make a pocket. We then folded the signatures together and sewed them into the journal, adding beads and decorations as we wanted. (It is always amazing to me that no matter how many people you have in a class, no one will produce anywhere near the same product. We are all so individual.) As I said, I decorated around my button, something I would not normally do. So I chose greens and reds, and put a lot of stuff on my journal. I happened to have some ribbon with greens and reds, so I decided to change the design of my journal and let the pocket show and put two buttons on it, one in front and one in back, why not??? All of the colors worked.
This was a great weekend! I ended up with three great journals that I will just look at and love. If I make more of them, which I have done, I will write in some of them, or give them as gifts. The main thing for me is that I have experienced again, " MORE GREAT FOOD FOR THE RIGHT BRAIN."