Spooky Memories - Piano Hinge Book featuring Stitchy Stamps papers

Papers from Stitchy Stamps

StitchyBear's Digi Outlet (SBDO) has hundreds of digital products from many wonderful artists, and I was excited to get to use the brand-new Dark Halloween papers from Stitchy Stamps. There are 10 wonderful scenic papers, so my Design Teamie Nikki and I split them up and used 5 each. She gave me first choice, so I went with the house/blue theme!

I decide to make a piano-hinge book showcasing the lovely digi papers and some fun family Halloween photos.

The first two spreads feature photos from years ago, when I first bought these costumes for our dogs. This is the best photo I've ever been able to get of Super Allen and Bat Walt!

The little candy is made from tissue paper and a round foam piece (I made it way back in 2012 and kept it for the perfect occasion). The Comic Word image was a freebie from TLC Creations. Here's my husband trying to get Allen to fly:

This is our iguana Percy, and I PhotoShopped the witch's hat onto his little head. The "spooky" sentiment is heat-embossed in black onto a shiny blue paper. I cut a banner with with deckle scissors and attached it with a funky owl brad.

The photo below is the only one from this year; I'm actually showing off Wonder Women pajamas that I got for my birthday! I added some gem-topped plastic spiders.

These Dark Halloween papers from Stitchy Stamps really inspired the whole book, but I used a spiderweb-patterned paper behind the photos and on the back. I colored the paper with blue inks.

I'm entering this card into the following fun Challenges:
The Crafting Cafe: Not a card
Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge: Anything Goes (4th entry)
Through the Purple Haze: Anything Goes

Thank you for visiting, and hope you'll check out the great products at SBDO,

"A Ladies' Diary" box & tiny journals

My mom has a fantastic papercrafting store that she hangs out at a lot, Scraps of Love. Since it's over 2000 miles away from where I live, she generously sends me wonderful papers & embellishments that she finds there (thank you, USPS flat-rate shipping!).

One thing in particular that she can purchase there that I can't find here are Graphic 45 papers. Scraps of Love has insanely talented instructors who do things with these papers that would make you cry, and Mom takes many of their classes and sends me the trimmings and any extra papers.

I decided to use the papers from their A Ladies' Diary Collection to make this box containing small journals, as I also wanted to practice my book-making. One fun thing about Graphic 45 papers is that each double-sided design comes in 3 sizes: 12x12, 6x6, and 8x8, so having different sizes gives you lots of options. The box is roughly 2 x 3.25 inches, based on the size of this cute fashion-card paper from the 8x8 pack.

click photos to enlarge

I couldn't help but use the Stampin' Up! Beautiful Wings Embosslit die to add some 3D embellishment. I used Glossy Accents to adhere the butterflies.

The box contains a tier of tiny boxes; I used the tutorial (well, sorta) by Bastel-Oase.

Here's the back of the box, without the lid:

Each 2x2 box contains a small book.

Three of the books are designed around the different sized "vintage stamps" from the paper collection. For the blank books, I used regular printer paper. Everything is inked with Antique Linen distress ink and/or edged with my E04 Copic marker (Lipstick Natural).

This is the smallest piano-hinge book I've ever made, at just under 3/4 inches wide:

I learned this technique from a book, but I used the tutorial at Making Mini Scrapbooks to refresh my memory.

For the second book, I used my awl to puncture a hole in the middle of the pages/cover, and ran some twine around and through the tiny spools, knotting it in the middle.

The next one is basically an accordion book with a wrap-around cover:

Mom had also sent me several pieces of this particular part of one of the collections' 12x12 sheets. It's a column of three of the vintage stamps, so I glued 3 of those together to make the book. I glued the spine, so the pages naturally created pockets for little journal tags.

Finally, I used Prima wood pieces to make a funky little accordion book:

The metal clock hands are actually from Tim Holtz's Game Spinner collection, but hey they work!

I decided to decorate the back of the pages, so I stamped it with a large background stamp (Flourishes llc), heat-embossed it with clear embossing powder, and inked it with pink chalk ink. I had used printer paper, so much to my surprise the heat-embossed portion became almost translucent. It created a vintage look that I'll definitely have to use again.

Many thanks to my wonderful husband for taking these photos, and for giving me some pointers on how to get better photos from now on. We had a real family photo session for this!

Inspiration/Challenges:
Charisma Cardz #33: More than one fold
Love to Create: Fancy Folds
Opus Gluei Challenge #163: The Start of Something BIG! (This project was inspired by my wanting to start book-making again, and to do more 3D projects)
Stamps & Fun = Creativity: Box
The Pink Elephant Monday Card Challenge: Anything but a Card

Update: This was a prize winner at Love to Create. Thank you!

Thank you for visiting, and if you're ever in Peora, Arizona, be sure to visit Scraps of Love!

The Poem as the Book

I'm super honored to have been encouraged by Meredith to participate in her poetry project on her blog, Half Starts & Trails Ofss.

I discuss the making of this piano-hinge book, which I made around a poem by Jenny O'Grady written in response to a painting by Melissa Van der Kaay for The Light Ekphrastic.

I've truly enjoyed Meredith's posts so far this month (including a wonderful one by her mom), so be sure to take a break and check them out.

 
I haven't been able to find a super tutorial of piano-hinge binding online, but there are several books with instructions available at the giant craft and book stores. It's fairly simple, once you get the hang of it. It's a heck of a lot easier than copic binding!You can use almost anything to bind it with: wooden skewers, toothpicks, coffee stirrers, chopsticks, straws, even sticks. My house is full of straight things I got for free around town, usually one at a time so that I don't feel like I'm actually hoarding.
And thank you to my editor Joshua, who wrote my post's intro paragraph with a better understanding of my written voice than I was managing to, and also for taking the photos of the book.

*
Supplies: Core'dinations cardstocks, Southworth Résumé paper, bird punch by ekSuccess, wooden skewers (from grocery store), HP printer & ink, acetate, SCAL & Cricut, Adobe InDesign, bone folder, ZipDry glue

I put together this basic tutorial on how to "stamp" with your printer.

You can view my other piano hinge books here.

All of my mini-books are here.

Read my whole article about this book on Half Starts & Trail Offs.

Wing books 1 and 2

Some months ago I tired of using my own writing for mini-books, so I put a call for work out on FaceBook. I have a lot of creative-writing friends on there, so I was very pleasantly surprised to receive many poems from friends I didn't even know were writers! I'm always hearing people say I wish I were more creative, but in my experience there's no shortage of creativity in this world: and it's always life-affirming and just plain fantastic. One of the first people to contact me was my former co-worker at the University of Baltimore, Kapricia. We'd talked poetry in the past, but I had know idea how many words she had in her! She sent me two poems that I made into the first two books of what I hope will be a series (hint hint!): The Day I Fell in Love
It was a cold and rainy day,
she decided to come anyway.
I couldn’t hold back the pain
& tears, and Oh Yes! a lil fear.
I heard the doctor say
“Push, push, push my dear
I see her head,
she’s almost here,”
So I gave it a push
and heard her cry
what a relief I felt inside.
I held her in my arms,
looked in her eyes.
I couldn’t believe she was
ALL MINE!!

Kapricia Williams ©2010

---

Wings to Fly
I have my own
cheering squad.
They clap as I fly high,
like a bird across the sky.
I’m soaring, flipping and doing tumbles
as I pass you by.
You see you had me cooped up
in what I thought
was love,
but I was wrong, so I
FLEW THE COOP! . . .
See the claps are not for me to return,
but for God’s grace and giving strength
to fly above all things.
Give Him a hand!

Kapricia Williams ©2010

Other books from my "FaceBook Friend" project:
the Shuttlecock!
Phenomenal Lady (also with a poem by Ms. Williams)

“Vere novo”

The other day, a friend from high school posted a poem, “Vere novo”/"The Genesis of Butterflies" by Victor Hugo, in the original French and was kind enough to post the English translation for me and my American Mouth. Hmm, I thought, maybe this is a sign to make a mini-book.

Later that evening, I found that I had won a prize of $12 worth of digis from Just Some Lines through the CDAC 5000 Members Blogger Contest (WOW, thank you!), and the first image I saw was her Butterfly on Flower Paper Cutwork design (PCW).

O don't you love it when a project just comes together‽

I've always wanted to make a book that reads in one language when held one way and in another language when held the other. I wouldn't want to do this with a long book, but eight one-sided pages were easy enough to lay out InDesign. And, of course, it had to be a piano-hinge book.

Merry 100th Blog Post

So here it is, my 100th blog post. Oh! how far we've come from idle cheesemaking, which was the original theme of this blog; Eighty-three of the posts are dedicated to crafting and were created in the past 7 months. In celebration, I'd like to share this:
Thanks everyone!

A book, womanly

For the mini-book challenge on Paper Craft Planet I decided to make another piano-hinge book, so I asked my Facebook Friends for quotes on Women (because I wanted to use a particular stamp), either something they liked or something they came up with. This is so much more fun than googling for quotes! I posted my call at 9am and by 1pm I had a nice mix:

It’s tough being a woman. -my cousin, WI

It gets better as you get older – just keep smiling & doing whatever turns you on. -my aunt, WI

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.” Virginia Woolf -submitted by a college/poet friend, MD

I love women: my wife’s one, & she’s awesome. -High School/theatre friend, CA

“I’m selfish, impatient & a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control & at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” Marilyn Monroe -submitted by a random acquaintance I've gotten to know well over Facebook, Norway
I decided to print the pages on vellum, so that they would sorta bleed into eachother. The effect is really lovely, and the book is a precious handful at 2.75x3 inches. I dyed the wooden skewers I used to bind the book with food coloring; letting them soak for 2 hours produced a deep color. I colored the stamped images on the back side of the paper, which covered up mistakes and really made the black outlines pop. I had the whole thing designed, printed and bound by midnight, and even managed to make 3 cards in the meantime. Thanks everyone, this was so much fun!
Inspiration: mini-book challenge on Paper Craft Planet (3d85)
Supplies: vintage wallpaper, Recollections vellum, Cricut personal cutter, SCAL software, HP printer & ink, Adobe InDesign, Tim Holtz scissors, ZipDry glue, rubber stamp from Stampin' Up!, Marvy paint pens, Copic marker E33, wooden skewers, McCormick food color + vinegar & water

This book is available on Etsy.

A Bookmark Book

This project combines some of my favorite things: piano-hinge books, bookmarks, digi stamps,
This was inspired by two challenges: Dutch Dare Challenge #87 and Scrapmaster's Paradise Color Combo #66. I was drawn to these challenges by the impressive examples, and had fun combining the two challenges into one project. The theme is "Live, Laugh Love," inspired by the paperfacesdesigns Angel series.

coloring, and first-thought writing.





Inspiration:
Dutch Dare Challenge #87: Bookmarks
Scrapmaster's Paradise Color Combo #66: Cajun Craze, Marina Mist, Wild Wasabi
Digi stamps: Live, Laugh, Love Angel series from paperfacesdesign
Bookmark quotes: Christina Gay
Supplies: Cricut personal cutter, SCAL software, K&Company designer double-sided cardstock, HP printer & ink, Tim Holtz scissors, ZipDry glue, Sharpies, Marvy paint pens, wooden skewers, heart brads, Offray ribbon