Finally, Failday Report

Okay, so after almost a week of procrastination I’m going to post about my last Saturday…

The day started out lovely, all sunny and stuff, making me really reluctant to do anything other than lying in puddles of sunlight and nap, but alas, I was determined to get a lot done despite the one day weekend this time.

I was browsing some blogs and they were talking about making cute pencil cases out of felt and wool and general cuteness out of a handmade product made for an etsy store. So I thought it’d be a good idea to make some, but first I needed a doodle book to doodle my ideas. That’s when my day started to go down hill. Instead of BUYING a sketchbook or finding some scrap paper like a normal person, I had the brilliant idea to MAKE my sketchbook.

Let’s all from my stupidity now and never have that as the reason to start making a book from scratch okay? You’ll hate yourself, and me.

It started well, with me grabbing some of the free computer paper my cousin didn’t want anymore and prepping it by getting rid of the holey things on the side.

Now fold in half and cut. I don’t have a paper trimmer so I’m doing this the hard way, with a craft knife using a ruler as guide.

Now fold those half pieces in half again.

Now put a couple of these folded things inside one another consecutively. I put 4 of them inside one another for this book. Each of these little things are called a signature by the way.

Now measure the signatures on their spine and divide it into 5 parts, at ratios of approximately 1:1:1.5:1:1. You can make both end divisions larger if your book is bigger. Pictured here is some dental floss which is good for a very budget book. Otherwise you’d want bookbinding thread and I’ve even heard that the pearl stranding strings work well too.

Now poke some holes where you marked to make sewing your signatures together easier then sew it up!

The sewing pattern is easy but I don’t want to explain it at this moment (because I’m tipsy) so you’d have better luck at looking at the one here. But It’ll look up like this.

Now, you’d want to finally put your textbooks to use by using them as paperweights to squash down your sewn up thing so you can smush some glue on that spine. Be sure to rub in good. Oh, yeah~. (I used white glue but I don’t recommend it since it dries hard. But it’s not like it’s unusable.)

Now the fail part starts. At the beginning, I wanted to like, cover the cardboard with a collage of magazine cutouts like so. But because I was using white glue, things dried slowly and into a hard page that I can’t fold into a cover. I also screwed up on the layering and there was glue on top of the pictures as well. Ugh. I spent my whole day on this too! I was so mad.

In the end, I just stuck some cardboard on for the cover, and left it unwrapped. It now looks super ghetto and I definitely glued the spine piece wrong.

Now, I also tried to make a spice cake on Saturday and uh, forgot that I was supposed to use two pans so the whole thing  bubbled ominously like lava and overflowed.  I was freaking out trying to scoop glops of it off the bottom of my oven before I managed to find another pan to put it in.

This beautiful piece of work has now been reduced to a very large pile of crumbs courtesy to a 2-hour ride in my bag on the train.

By the way, this is what I did with the holey strips that came off the paper.