Binding ‘The Documented Life Project 2015’

Goodmorning sweeties… a beautiful, sunny morning in my part of the world. It looks like it’s {almost} Spring and I even heard Spring-birds (blackbirds?) sing yesterday. But I saw on the news that you in the USA suffer from blizzards and I saw pictures of meters of snow laying in the streets of New York city… I hope you are all safe over there (and to my dear brother, trucker in Canada & USA: listen to your big sis and drive carefully!!!)

I told you that a few weeks ago I finished all the pages with the prompts from The Documented Life Project 2015. Today I want to show you the very last page I created and how I bound all the pages into a book.

December 26
December Theme: Storytelling with the Written Word
Art Challenge: Storytelling
Journal Prompt: Storytelling as an underlying fabric

For the last prompt, “Storytelling”, I reflected on the past (creative) year. With a large brush I smeared purple acrylic paint on the page. Because I used an old book for the Documented Life Project, you can see the text shimmering through. With a white marker (Sharpie) I wrote my ‘story’ on top of it.

After I’d finished creating pages with all the promps I had a stack of loose pages (signatures) on my desk, with the inside of the last signature blank and left to fill. For that, I printed the prompts and glued the prints on these pages…

… and I stamped the title on the very first (title) page.

The cover of the book I used for this project was beautiful of itself. It shows the title and an image in golden relief print (“Italian Folk-Fairytales.”) I did not want to cover that up with paint so I stamped my own title on top of it. The old title shows through and I like it that way!

Last but not least: I bound my journal using the Coptic Stitch.

All in all, I am very pleased with this journal. It had been a while since I altered a book and I liked working on the old text-pages during the year. While working in it, all kinds of ideas came to me and I am now turning these ideas into a (live) workshop. More about that soon…

For now: have a good week y’all. If you are stuck in the house because of the snow – stay warm and cosy and if you have to go outside, be careful not to fall. See you soon!