Friday, January 13, 2012

Notebooks

I guess we've neglected to say Happy New Year to everyone.  So, I hope you're all having a great 2012 so far!  I feel like we're a lot further into the year already, so it's always a surprise when I see the date.  And I don't feel bad for not having accomplished more already.  I don't need to get a month's worth of stuff done in 12 days!
Anyway, on to the project. These are some notebooks I made in December. I thought they turned out very nicely, if I do say so myself, and thought they'd be fun on the blog. :-)



I've always thought it would be fun to make a notebook, but somehow overwhelming to think about. But my friend sent me a link to a handmade one a few months ago and after a while I finally decided to try it out. I had all these notebooks that I bought for piano lessons, but can't use because after a couple of weeks, the pages start falling out. -- if you buy 5 cent notebooks at Walmart, be sure they're spiral bound. It makes all the difference -- We had planned to donate them, but hadn't gotten to it yet when I decided they'd be perfect. I could just cut them down to the size I wanted. So I got out our trusty paper cutter and went to work. In case you're wondering what great paper cutter I had that would cut all that paper together, I don't. I'm not sure, but it might be older than me and won't do more than a few pieces at a time. But it works.  I added decorative scrapbooking paper, which is what really makes these fun. I just cut a bunch to the right size and randomly stuck them into the notebook paper. I'm not good with random, but I worked hard at it. :-)
The covers I made out of cardboard. It was hard to get the holes into the cardboard with the hole punch, but with help, they all got punched.  I covered them with scrapbook paper and stickers on some of them.  Some of them I thought looked nice just plain.  I joined it all together with scrapbook rings and there you have a notebook. :-) 


 I wanted to make a cover for them.  The cover is actually how all this got started.  I was looking through a magazine and found these cute book covers, but I wanted these for a gift and I didn't know what book to cover and give, so eventually I came up with the notebooks.  I ended up using some wide eyelet (my brilliant mother's idea), I folded it over and right sides together, I sewed up the bottom and two sides.  I sewed a button to one side and a loop of ribbon to the other and there's a very nice cover.  Very simple.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

in which The Distracted Dame wields a crow-bar to great effect

Well, friends.  After a long haitus from both blogging and working on my camper, afore-mentioned-in-many-words, I was tempted outside by a genuinely beautiful Christmas break Saturday and put in another installment of working on my camper.  I thought I would share a few photos from the Day of Demo....

How things looked in the calm before the storm...
My darling brother tearing out one of the cabinets
The cabinet used to be over that wheelwell
The "kitchen" cabinet, in process
Nasty insulation under the cabinet
Cabinet, dinette and table GONE!
All of the trim, screws and hardware I could pry off and unscrew in an afternoon...
Cute and classy!
It took part of another afternoon to rip out the couch/bed from the other end of the camper.  I am now pretty much down to the nitty-gritty work of pulling apart the walls and skin.  I uncovered a lot of holes in the floor during all that demolition....  And I must admit, I am wondering if I'll have to reskin the whole thing as well as replace the wood.  Sounds like I'll have to bring under real cover before I do much more!

Friday, January 6, 2012

One Little Word

I just started my second year of One Little Word with Ali Edwards at Big Picture Classes.  Last year was a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to another year of it.  If you've never heard of One Little Word, it is a sort of online scrapbook class where you choose one word to think about for the year and each month you get a new prompt for your scrapbook.  I don't know that I explain it that well.  If you are interested, go to Big Picture Classes and search for One Little Word.  My friend who lives around 1,000 miles away got me started and it's a fun thing that we do together that makes 1,000 miles seem not so far away.  
 Here is my PreClass prompt (we got this one before the year started). 


As you (I hope) can see, my word is Grace this year.  And so I will try to be more Graceful over the year.  We can all hope, anyway!