Final touches

Nullus Anxietas is only a bit over a week away and I need to start getting myself packed.  I did want to make one last little thing for my costume that had been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while- my own dis-organiser.  I had found a cute little empty locket at Spotlight and thought it would make a great start.  Only problem was, it was tiny!  The cutting board I use has 1 cm lines marked, so you can see this is NOT a large space to work with.

My first attempt was less than successful. With the note on it, you couldn't see the interior.  On the other hand, that was a good thing since the interior was rubbish.

My imp (fimo) was way too big, as were the gears and the DIY bicycle the imp was meant to ride to power the clockwork was way too small.

So it was onto plan B.  Step one of which was to get my hands on some model railway figures (N gauge or 1:160 scale).
A bit of paint on a seated man reading a paper, a finetip marker to make it the AM Times and some scrap paper to make large ears and I had an imp.

New imp next to the old one and the old background in the top left

Next was to make a home for him.  The easiest way to to that with this scale was to use the printer.  A few google searches for suitable images and I had a gear background (actually the image of a old pocketwatch workings), and a room.

The window is from a model railway kit.  I was going to put some white paper or hints of another room on the other side but when I saw what it looked like with the gears, I left it as is.

A bit of very thin wood cut to size made a floor, aged up with a drop of woodstain after drawing floorboards with a fineliner.

The chair is hijacked from a 1:144 scale house that is a work in progress on long term hiatus and the corkboard and clock are another google image result, shrunk down to size and printed before being cut out and stuck down.

Finally, to add a bit of extra colour, I made a mini pot plant for the imp out of a seed bead, a scrap of green landscape foliage for railways, dotted with red paint for flowers.

And here is the result!

The note is now on the inside lid as now I want people to see the interior!  If anyone reading this is coming to the convention, come find me- I'd love to show it in person.

We have swamp dragons!

It's done!  The head only nods, it doesn't turn like I wanted but he's done, stuffed and ready.  I'll probably use a bit of hidden velcro or tape or similar to hold him in place when walking around but I'm resonably pleased.  I won't be posting a full tutorial down the track as a lot involved making it up as I went and fixing the odd bit that went a bit funny, but if you do know a little about sewing and toymaking, I should be posting enough to let you make your own version. That won't be for at least a month so stay tuned!

Four weeks to go... uh oh...

ARRRGGGHHH!  Only four weeks to go before the convention, and my weekends are already too busy (glances guiltily at the unmarked SACs in the corner).  But I really want to finish my dragon (not to mention make the rest of the costume!) so I got stuck in this weekend to try and finish him off.

Here's the side view- as you can tell, I've not put the front legs on yet!

Front legs are on and you can see he has ears and a face

I think I'm on the home stretch now, I just need to make some ears wings (which are basically slightly bigger ears).  He's not got the range of movement that I really wanted (while he can nod well, it's very hard to get him to turn his head side to side).

I also tried to make a 'leather' apron for Lady Sybil to wear but.. well the less said, the better right now. I've not experienced the joy of sewing vinyl in a machine before and while I tried a few tricks, they are not helping right now.  I'm leaning towards ignoring seam details and just hand sew the string/ neck band on and calling it good enough.  And I have no idea about the rest of the costume, too little time, no great ideas.  ARRRGGHH!

Oh, and I've been told that some people (hi Mum!) are having issues with commenting.  Sorry- I've tried playing with the settings available to see if that helps but I would rather not have it anonymous as I end up playing spam filter to poorly worded advertising posts.

Making a swamp dragon- Post 1 of ?

Urgh, the 40C weather has come and I don't like it!  It's also a scarily short period of time before the Australian Discworld Convention- at least if you have not yet done any thing for your costume *eep!*

So I have spent some time today starting my very own puppet swamp dragon.  Early days so far but here is the head with some features.

Don't mind the bit on the bottom left- that's the gap for me to add stuffing and other things

I'm just working on the ears now as I want to have the head as complete as possible as it needs the most attention to the details.  There will be a pattern of sorts at some point in the distant future but for now I am just going to be recording progress!

The end of the holidays (sob!)

As I procrastinate my morning away on my first day back at work, I thought I would post a final update on some finished projects.

First up, I managed to make a tear off calendar of my own in time for January to be of some use!  Here are the pages before assembly.

And in the nick of time and after several days of frustration as the spine guilding wasn't working (turns out that varnishing the fabric before guilding is NOT optional) I managed to put my latest two Discworld stamp yearbooks together.  I even found time to put stamps into the 2014 edition!

Oh, and I also assembled/varnished the cute bookend that you see.  Little tip- don't buy the tubes of acrylic paint from Kmart- I used the ENTIRE tube of white to try and paint it and it was so watery that it still didn't cover it properly.  I had to use another paint to give it the final coat.

Craft is going to be on the backburner for a while but I'll post if I come up with anything that might be useful!

Small monthly desk calendar

At the end of November, there is the annual Hogswatch event for Discworld fans, in the little town of Wincanton, Somerset, England.  But for many fans, including myself, it's a little far to pop in and visit. So instead, several of us got together in a Skype chat and had our own fun.  I wrote* a lovely little quiz and made this little desk calendar as a prize for the winner.  It has a Discworld stamp theme with tear off pages but if you like bookbinding or scrapbooking you should enjoy this and can easily modify it for any theme you like.  It also folds flat which means it is a great present to post.

This post is going up 28th December so if you are sitting around the house, tired from the Boxing Day Sales (or avoiding the shops completly) it's a fun couple of hours (most of that time being design- decision making is hard!)

This small calendar has tear off pages and sits nicely on a desk or table

*well, stole questions from various places online

Materials

• Various scrapbook papers 7.5 cm x 11 cm
• One piece of light card 7.7 cm x 23.5 cm
• Print out of months- I just googled '2015 calendar' and found something that would work for me.  If you are reading this post in a later year, obviously change the year to something suitable!
• Decorative bits (my theme was a Discworld stamp calendar but you could go with anything you like)
• Hole punch- smaller holes would work better but you could probably make do with a holepunch.
• Pretty string (it will be visible and need to hold the calendar together so choose carefully)
• Needle with an eye big enough for the string
• Drill with small drill bit
• Pretty button

Note- all the sizes are based on what I made, with minimal layers on each page.  If you make your pages with lots of layers/thickness you will need to adjust some of these dimensions, particularly for the cover.
Method
Step 1 is the hardest part- deciding what papers to use for what month!

Draw a faint line on the bottom of your calendar, 2 cm from the bottom.  Use this as a guide to make a row of holes for each page using the holepunch.  This is what will let you tear away months as they pass.  Spacing of the holes will depend on what size punch you have.  If you are worried, have a practice on a bit of scrap paper to see what is the best spacing to allow you to tear away later.

Layout and glue down the bits to make your calendar up.  Make sure you keep your work above the row of holes.

Now for the cover.  Take the card and score at the 2.5, 3, 14, 14.5 cm lengths (if your pages are thicker then adjust here accordingly).

Scoring the lines with a knife or a bone folder (note- not actually made of bone these days!) is crucial for crisp folds

Fold at the score marks and check if your pages fit into the cover correctly.

Horray, the pages fit in nicely!

Now to mark out the dots to drill with.  Exact measurements don't matter, provided things look symmetrical.  You want to make three holes in a triangle, with one dot in the middle and further from the bottom than the other two.  See the picture and you'll see what I mean.

Location of holes and numbered so you can follow the next bit.  Note my incredibly useful little hand drill

Use bulldog clips to hold everything together, cover and pages, while you drill the holes.  Another bit of scrap paper is useful to prevent marks being left on your cover.

Appearance after step 1

Now to sew it all together.  Take a long length of string (about a meter.  You won't use it all but it is much better to have too much than too little!) and thread it onto the needle.  To sew, refer to the diagram above to follow along with each hole:

1. Starting from the front, go through hole 2 leaving a length of around 10 cm of string.  
2. Go through hole 2 again from the front and pull tightly.
3. From the back, bring the needle through hole 1 to the front, then loop the thread around the bottom and bring the needle through hole 1 again from back to front.
4. Loop the thread around the left side of the book and through hole 1 again from back to front.
5. Put the needle through hole 2 from the front and bring the thread around the left side to the front before putting the needle through hole 2 again from front to back.
6. On the back, put the needle through hole three to bring it to the front.  Take the thread to the back around the base and back through hole 3 .
7. Take the thread to the back again and through hole three.
8. Bring the needle through hole 2 and you should have the pattern now completed.

Tie the threads off (a drop of clear nail polish is a good way to secure the knot) but leave about 10 cm of length for each.

The threads will be used to wrap around a button to hold the cover closed or open in place on a desk.  Just put the button onto the cover, use a pencil to mark where the holes are and punch out with a needle or holepunch.  Sew the button into place and tie string off at the back.

And you are pretty much done.  I prettied up the cover, just because I could but you could also leave it plain if you preferred.

Gilt lettering and more Discworld stamp yearbooks

It's only been a week and already the school holidays seem a distant memory.  Thanks to a rotten bug, I didn't get as much relaxing crafting done as I wanted but I did manage to play with something I bought years ago.

One of the things I always wished I could do with the books that I create was to make good looking, crisp, gold lettering.  Metallic pens just don't do the job in my experience- they don't shine the way that metal does and the majority of pens just don't go fine enough (the finest one I have is a 0.3mm tip).  But years ago I came across Hugh Spark's webpage which talked about using a product that lets you print with a laser printer, gilt those letters and then transfer that to anything you like as a decal.  The stuff used I bought from Pulsar Pro FX (website was working a few weeks ago but now seems to be down?).

I followed Hugh Spark's instructions and for the most part, it worked well.  There most definitely a learning curve, and there are a lot of steps where things can go wrong.  But after battling the gremlins, I managed to make these...

These were all created as presents for friends.  As you can see, not all had the same spine contents thanks to the decal not always surviving intact to the end of the process!  But it worked well enough and enough survived that I was pleased with what I produced, particularly compared to previous methods.

And after doing all that, I had to get around to making my own.  The observant among you will notice that I have cheated with years and am not making these in year order at this point.  I do plan to fill in those gaps, but I also wanted to have somewhere to put the stamps that I am only lightly collecting again...  *wimper*  I can stop any time I want to... 

Discworld stamp Yearbooks

One of the last things I did on my break before pulling out the work I needed to do was to finish my most recent Discworld Stamp Yearbook.  It seemed particularly appropriate as this year is the 10 year anniversary of Discworld stamps.

These were inspired by stamp Yearbooks I have seen for Australian stamps.  Now since I don't collect them, I've only seen them for sale in the Post Office, but from what I saw, I loved the idea of information about what was featured in the stamp in addition to the stamp details and, of course, a place to put the stamps themselves!

For some stamps, I had fun researching the techniques that were used

Two of these were made several years ago, but I just finished the 2007 Discworld Stamp Yearbook and put my stamps in.  So now I want to show off my collection.

I love pages that have all the sports!

For others, I have wishful thinking gaps.

I only have one years worth of stamps to have my collection stored in as after 2008 I dropped collecting due to lack of time.  While I have bought the odd edition if it was particularly cool looking (one of these days I'm going to decoupage some of them for instance), I didn't have time to keep up as I always wanted to get the sports in addition to the commons.  Now I think about it though, I could start again with a reduced 'just the commons' policy....  *twitches*

If you would like to make a Discworld Stamp Yearbook of your own, feel free!  I've linked to the files below.  Read through my series on Bookbinding (starts here) to see how to print these out and bind them into a hard cover book.

Links (Word files)

Year 1 (2004-2005)

Year 2 (2006)

Year 3 (2007)

More info on stamps

The Cunning Artificer shop (where to buy them from)

The Discworld Stamp Catalogue (if you want to identify an unknown Discworld stamp)

Magazine Folio holder

This post is a re-write of an article I wrote many years ago for the Discworld stamp journal, The Stanley Howler Stamp Journal.  The purpose of the article and this post is to create a non-damaging folio cover for magazines so they can be neat and sorted, while still just as easy to read, plus can be removed without difficulty if needed.

 

All of the sizes and measurements given here are for A5 magazines (booklets made when an A4 piece of paper is folded in half and stapled in the middle).  If you are dealing with magazines of a different size, you will need to work out your own sizes.  A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the cover is a few millimetres larger than the cover of your magazines to allow for movement and to protect the contents.

Materials

• Thick card (posterboard or similar) NOT corrugated card for the spine in particular as it will not have the necessary compressive strength.  Two larger pieces for the cover (15.1cm by 21.8 cm) and one narrow piece (21.8 cm by the width of your spine- for an 8 journal cover 2.5 cm is good, for a 10 journal cover, I am using a 3 cm width piece)

• A sharp knife (plus bandaids/ first aid kit/ blood bank depending on how clumsy you are!
• A steel ruler
• Cutting mat
• Thick card or chipboard (for best effect the card should be difficult to fold- about the thickness of a hard cover book’s cover.).
• PVA glue
• Pretty paper (It is possible to get creative here if you like- fabric can be used if first stuck onto a plain piece of paper and there is practically an unlimited number of different colours and designs of paper available)
• String or thin cord (this must be STRONG- if you can easily break it with your hands it is too weak)
• Lots of clean, scrap paper and newspaper
• Large flat weights (I use old textbooks)

Method

Take your two large pieces of card and the paper you will use for the cover (green in my case).  Apply an thin, even coat of glue to one side of your card and glue to the paper.

To prevent wrinkles, immediately place this, paper side down, onto a pile of your newspaper with a clean piece of scrap paper in between (so newsprint doesn't get onto your cover).  Then place a heavy book ontop. This draws the moisture of the glue out of the cover paper and the weight stops wrinkles having a chance to form.

Wait until dry, then turn over and glue the sides over.  One neat way to do this is to trim the corners on a 45 degree angle to the card corner, at least one centimetre away from the card.  Fold this over to the card and glue down.  Repeat on all corners.

Then fold and glue each side down.  Leave to dry.

In the meantime, you can also do the same thing with the spine piece, or if you choose to add mock headband affects (see step 7), then you could skip this or just colour/paint the ends.

I just coloured the ends in on my spine as I will be covering it later

Take the spine and use the back of a knife or the steel ruler to place even 'notches' in the ends of the card where the string will go.  This ensures the string stays in place.

Tape one end of the string to the back of the spine and wrap the string TIGHTLY around the spine to create the necessary number of loops for your journal.  

Tape the other end in place, then use craft glue or hot glue along the entire back to secure the string.  

Back of spine after wrapping thread, before adding glue

Front of spine.  Each length of thread will hold one magazine

Optional:  Inbetween the string on the ends, take some contrasting coloured embroidery floss or similar and glue lengths in between.  This gives the appearance of headbands of a book (see Part 3 of my Book binding series to find out what these are in more detail)
Over this, glue a piece of paper, cut to a little narrower and shorter than the spine.  This helps to secure the string and also provides a good surface to glue the book together with later.  Leave to dry.
Take another piece of paper to make the exterior spine.  This paper should be fairly thick and sturdy as it will be under the most long term stress.  The paper should be taller by at least 5 cm and the width of your spine plus 1.5 cm to allow the paper to fold, plus 2-3 cm on each side for the spine paper to be glued to the covered.  In practical terms for me, that meant a piece of paper 28 cm tall by 15 cm wide.

Carefully place the spine card onto the spine and ensure it is centred.  Mark this position, then glue the back of the spine card (the bit with the paper covering the strings) to this spine paper. Let dry.

Now you can glue the covers to the spine paper.  You want to leave room for the paper to fold or your holder will not be able to close.  Try to have a even gap of 0.75-1cm on each side.  One easy way is to use a bit of scrap card cut to size that you can use to align the cover in the correct place.

Here you can see the brown bit of scrap card I used to position the cover in the right place and straight.  You can also see that I have glued green thread between the gold string on the spine prior to gluing it to the spine paper to get a headband effect and to hide the card

Glue both covers into place and let dry.

Optional- if you are using thinner paper or you think it will get a lot of wear, you may wish to add a bit of extra reinforcing paper on the top and bottom parts.  If so, do so now.

Use a pair of scissors or a sharp knife with ruler to cut the spine paper at a slight angle.  You want this cut to be to the corner of each spine card so the paper can be folded over and glued (see the picture below).

Make the cuts at a slight angle.  Note the extra paper I've glued in first to reinforce the ends of the spines

Once the sides are glued in place, use a ruler and a knife to cut the little left over piece off, top and bottom.

Use a ruler and a sharp knife to cut off this extra piece of paper flush with the edge of the book holder

Final step is to cut some endpapers inside to neaten things up.  Either measure up some paper a few millimetres smaller than the journal holder or use one or two pieces of A4 paper.  If you can find a piece of paper long enough great, but otherwise cut both pieces to a length so that one is long enough for one cover to the edge of the other and the other the size of the other cover.  It's your choice if you would like the edge of the paper showing on the back or the front or back, but I do suggest you glue the longer piece of paper (the bit that will cover the spine) down first, then the smaller piece of paper.  Let everything dry.

Before use, lay it flat on a table, outside facing up and run your thumb down the fold lines for the covers.  This helps neatens everything up and ensures the folds look right.

To use, open each magazine in the middle and insert it under a string.  That's it!  If you have any extra bits and bobs, a page protector with with the folder holes trimmed off works well either on an extra string or inserted in or around another magazine.

Discworld cross stitch pattern

This is a project that has been on the back burner for more than the life of one computer- when I found my save file of my work in progress I had to search for software to install to finish it up!

Back when I was trying some miniature petit point pieces, I showed you a Discworldy piece I did on blue silk.  Well for the zero's of people who then contacted me about it, here's the pattern I created to make it.  Two versions since some prefer colour charts, while others prefer black and white charts.

Usual disclaimer too- I am not Terry Pratchett and therefore I don't own Discworld in any way, shape or form.  These are for fellow geeky fanart creators, not for anyone to make a buck off.

Mock up to get a feel for what it will look like

And if you do want to mount this into a broach fitting, then a useful tip is to make a paper template the right size to fit inside and use this to cut the cardboard backing that you wrap your embroidery around.

Green paper is my template, used to cut
the card to the right shape for the fitting

Can't show you a picture of the finished product- silly me forgot to do so before sending it only to my secret hogfather giftee on the Discworld forum.