Let the good times roll!

Before blogs exist, I was an avid journal writer. I wrote in details of what's going on in my life and kept that habit for a very long time. I kept my journals from years back, and once in a while, reading the pages reminded me of who I used to be and who I've become (so far).

...Until I got tired of reading about the past, and decided it was about time to let go some of the memories. I'm not very fond of my handwriting, but since I've put in so much energy into writing essay-length entries, I thought it was worth being appreciated.

Hey, you need to let go of the old memories to make way for the ones, right?

So this idea popped up.

The cover pages of the book was from an old diary. They weren't THAT old, but I aged the pages by dumping them into coffee-filled water - it didn't work well apart from giving that faint coffee smell, so I cheated and used distress inks instead. Ha!

This was also a part of an ongoing bookbinding challenge by Little Syam (my bookbinding guru), where we had to use recycle materials in our book design.

I still have a lot of pages (tons of them) left from my old journals, and I'd probably blend everything together and do some scented-recycle papers for keep. I just can't find time for that... yet. +__+

Meanwhile, enjoy the book! (but mind the handwriting!)

Purplelistic

A special request for a special day.

The book.

 

The signage.

Trial and Error

They're 3.5" books, for stitching practices.

I have to admit, my stitches aren't neat as other bookbinders, and my works always borderline the sloppy/ messy kind. So I guess why not go all out and make some sloppy and messy (and funky) kind of books that I like?

Hence, the wacky stitches. Still have a lot to improve on, but I'm loving these. :)

The feelings

I've made 'em lots, and I chose this one to be my favourite of them all, simple because:

i) I love the colours

ii) Raindrops abound!

First look at the cover and it basically sums it up as a very emotional book. :P

Books I adore

Few months back I had the opportunity to widen my craftscope and took up new challenge by attending bookbinding workshop organised by Little Syam. Yes, I do know the basic of bookbindings, as I've done them before (even posted some on the blog). However, I do believe that even with the easily-found tutorials online, you still need a real teacher to teach you things that youtube can't. I've learned a lot from Kak Syam - the techniques, the little tips you might miss, the types of paper/ glue/ tools etc. I would totally encourage those of you who are interested in bookbinding to join her class, as you'd get pretty much more than what you're expecting. At least I know I did.

This was one of the first few books I've made after attending the class (and I've continued making 12 others in a span of 1 month, for practice LOL). I use scrapbook paper as the base and brown recycle paper for the book signatures.

It doesn't even look like my style (which I think is more grungy and 'quilly' haha), but I've enjoyed experimenting anyway. Sometimes you just need to delve into something that is out of your comfort zone, to improve yourself.

The Home-Made Scrapbook Album (sounds like Muffin, isn't it? :P)

I've talked a bit about Shera in my previous entry.  So here's the mini scrapbook album that I made for her. Truthfully, after few failures of making good scrapbook pages, I was a bit worried that I couldn't do the album according to her requested details (which is like a page long hehe!). Aaannnnd I was a bit worried that I couldn't make the album 'young' enough, since both Shera and her friend were like... half my age! (okay, a bit less than half :P).

She wanted kanzashi flowers, and I made three of them using sugar paper, and I really like the result! I designed the pattern paper (yes, from scratch), and used Words to decide on the colours. Since I tried to avoid huge patterns, I decided to tone down the prints, and use repetition of stripes, boxes, squares, frizz etc as the patterns. And they worked! There are 16 pages altogether (including the front and the back). I made the tags using chipboards and printed words, and decorate the pages with ribbons and flowers.

These were all the pages that I've made, but minus the flowers for the inside pages (since I've added them at the very last minute and  wrapped everything up before realising I didn't take the final pic!

I'm very proud to say that all the items used in the making of the scrapbook were bought from normal stationery shop, and I printed the papers, notes and tags, and none were bought from any craft stores (including the ribbons!).

Sincerely hope Ryhana would love the album. :)

Scrapbook of '94

The first time I tried my hands on proper scrapbooking, I thought it was ugly, that I scrapped it off after few days. Then I concentrated on making digital scrapbooking, mainly because I'm much better dealing with digital papers and embellishments rather than the real ones. I can do cards at any times, but scrapbooking need so much more - wider spaces, deeper thoughts, selection of pictures, selection of wordings etc.. which I'm totally scared of. And didn't I tell you that I tried to avoid pattern papers as much as possible? :P

And then, Shera happened. Shera is 14, and wanted me to design a special birthday present in a form of mini scrapbook album for her good friend (which will be in later entry). That itself immediately reminded me of when I was in high school (sometime in early 94), and did my first ever scrapbook to my best friend. It was nothing fancy, but I still wanted to share, as momentos always made me go all gooey and jelly hehe. It was made from a normal exercise book, and wrapped in a extra wrapping paper that I used to wrap my school desk with. At the front page I wrote: Just 4U2C: Miss Iza. (4U2C was also a name of a famous Malaysian boy band (back then), who claimed to be some rappers, and wore CD on their necks. Hahahaha!

Yes, it was meant for her, but I borrowed the book few years back to snap some pics, then totally forgot to give it back to her hahaha. Sorry Iza! Everything inside the book was written in a mix of Malay (in a wee bit Terengganu dialect) and a bit of English. There were almost 80 pages and I wrote on ALL the pages! - Things you do for your best friend :P.

As for what's inside... welll... you know.. hormones boiled at 16, and of course we went crazy over some hunks and artists and secret admirers in school. So one of the pages was dedicated to.. HAHAHAA. Sorry. Couldn't stop laughing. :P

This was the year when Azhar Sulaiman was famous (he still is!), and he was 23. He's now 39, but trust me, he didn't even age a bit. Here's the proof:

(I googled and found his facebook profile picture haha). I purposely blurred the writing because I was too embarrassed of what I wrote :P).

Since the dear friend went crazy over some international stars as well, one of the pages was this:

(Ugly handwriting alert!)

You see, my main source was the old magazines that my sister bought, and the only printed papers that I had were some scraps of wrapping papers found around the house. I made use of an old schoolbook, by tearing down the used pages. My daily school allowance was RM1.00 per day, so I don't have enough to even buy my own stuff without my parents' help :P

Here's another page - it was the secret crush page of 93 (oh well, we had our crushes changed every year anyhow... :P)

.. And this scrapbook wouldn't be completed without few pages mumbling about our classmates haha! (They're going to freak out if they know we did this, and still have the scrapbook to prove it! Sorry guys! :P)

And I'm saving this for last. It's a loooong story of how this guy came into being, and made my life a laughing stock (93 till now) HAHAHA. Let's just summarize that at 15, I smacked myself on the floor and somehow the brain got twisted so bad that I went crazy/ obsessed/ hysterical over this one particular famous person, and the ending of the stupid crush involved losing a bet and a broken heart hahaha. (And a long 2-page rambling in the scrapbook.) Erm, I torn my used-to be favourite pic of him to pieces - to symbolize how my heart was shattered in pieces too. LOL!

As this was also part of my past, and although I'm a hugely embarrased of what I did before (everytime I retold the story, everyone had tears in their eyes - from LAUGHING!), the absurdity of the whole thing always made me smile, and laughed.

Hope you've enjoyed the journey to my past. :) We'll go back to 2010 in the next entry, okay!

Delicious books

I wish I'm still in in school, when autographs were very popular, so I could use one of these for others to write. I wish I still have to attend lectures, and would proudly use one of these for note-takings. I wish I've started working full time, so I could show these off to my colleagues (or perhaps, students? heh!). Why is that the idea of finally giving it a try at bookbinding only occured when I have neither of those? Maybe I could use them as my idea book, for sketches and designs I plan to do for my crafts. They've been everywhere these days - I wrote on scrap papers, books, small notes etc.. need to start combining them all and put them in one. proper. book.

I have to admit, I'm always crazy about books, and always envy those delicious-looking books in multiple colours on the shelves at bookstores. But I've always stop short of buying them, putting a thought at the back of my head - I'll learn bookbinding, and I'll bind books with beautiful covers like these! (and ended up buying those boring looking writing pads in bulk haha). Well, the truth is, I said that ever since high school, but never actually had the guts or the ways of fulfilling that very wish.

Not until last week. When I googled around for something totally un-craft related but ended up on craft websites anyway (why is that always happened to me?! :P) hehe. At first I thought I'll give Japanese bookbinding a try, because it seems simple enough. And so I did. And finally, when tutorials of coptic binding were shovered upon my Window screen (they kept on appearing, regardless how many times I tried to ignore), I decided to give it a try. It sure looks complicated at first, but after hours of trying (almost 4 hours!), I finally made my very first coptic-stitched book. Yeay!

Then I got addicted and started to make more books, and instead of spending hours per book, I spend less than 2 hours to make one. I can even speed up on the stitching part yeay! Unlike Japanese bookbinding where you have to make creases in order to write in the book, coptic binding allows the book to open flat. It shows off the fine spines of the books, which I totally love, and  it gives you plenty of ideas on how to improve your binding skills. You can show off your stitching skills too, though it's not really that nice in my case :P

And the way you stationed the holes for the stitching also play the role of varying the stitching design. And different threads used for stitching will also give different effects to the whole look too. I'm currently using white nylon fishing thread, but can't wait to try other colours as well :)

And as you can see, I tried making the signatures (the folded sheets grouped together) in different colours as well, and the result was amazing!

I already have few ideas and techniques on how to improve - and I simply can't wait to get started.  :P

Japanese book binding

I watched some tutorials online and thought I found the simplest way to bind a book. I'm in love with Japanese book binding and hence, the try:

These were made using scrapbits from previous projects, and I happened to have few meters of paper strings left, so I thought of giving it a go. The stitching part was the hardest, since I was too lazy to dig up my sewing box (gathering dust under the bed ha!), so I stitched the pages without using any needle. Oh yes I did. *bangs head on the wall*. On some 1/8" round holes. Stupid decision, I know, but still do-able. :P

It was a mess cutting and slicing the papers, so they ended up with some uneven pages.

I like the hard cover of my first book though, and the wrapper was actually one of my favs.

The second try was much better, but I wasn't really fond with my colour choice for the hard cover. I messed up again when I tried mod-podging the cover (need to get used to this mod-podging business!), so it came out with all the bubbles, scattered and uneven, and it didn't look very nice. :( I tried covering it up with the E alpha, but it only solved half the problem.

Remind me to find more coloured strings for the bindings, and I'll give it a try again, with much better colour coordinations. And with much better design. And sizes. Or perhaps I should use ribbons too.

The front cover looked so bare so I used the alphas that I made before to decorate on them. At least now they looked decent enough heh!

Gift Box

Sorry for not being able to blog for the past few days. Been quite busy lately with presentations and assignments. I can't even find time to do crafts too. I can't finish the layout for the 3rd LSQ challenge since the printer is out of ink and my sis used the camera. I know the due date is tomorrow so I'm going to buy new printer ink this afternoon (and need to mail few cards to a buyer ;p) and try to finish up by today. For now, I'' leave you with this entry.

Remember this?


I blogged about this here.

Like I said before, these paper clips were part of a gift box that also consists of 2 accordion album. Well, this is how the gift box looks like:




And these are the accordion albums that I made based on Yatie's RAK (I won a hand-made accordion album from Yatie for winning the May Challenge @ Lovescrap.

This is how both albums look like:



I've done this in May but until now, I can't find time to start decorating the albums.

Oh, I went to Cineleisure to watch The Dark Knight yesterday (which was really AWESOME!!!) and took the time to stop by Papier and finally bought:

Flower Punch (1 small and one medium in size)
Inkpad for my stamps
Some cute little brads

I'm starting on creating my own (hand-made) Prima flowers. Once I got hold of the camera, I'll put up the tutorials ok!