Friday 4 July 2014

Mini journals with Dylusions inks

I recently bought a pad of A4 watercolour paper to experiment with.  On the same day I also received my order of Dylusions ink sprays.  It didn't take me long for me to put the two together!  The results were amazing! I loved blending the colours and let them mingle on the watercolour paper. Some of the colours are so vivid, they almost hurt my eyes! I wasn't quite sure what to do with my inked papers though.  In the end I decided to turn them into mini journals. I also cut up a sheet for bookmarks to be decorated later.

When cutting the sheets for my journals, I was careful to make sure that the grain runs parallel to the spine, which seems to be quite important in book binding to ensure it lies flat.  My A4 watercolour paper had the grains run along the long side (in portrait orientation) so I just simply cut the A4 sheets in half to make 2 X A5 sheets and then  folded them in half again to make an A6 journal. I also cut some of the A4 sheets into DL size strips and folded them in half. Here's a better explanation of sizes: A4/A5/A6/A7/DL.

Then I pricked 4-5 holes along the spines and sewed three pages together (using regular sewing thread) to make 6-page mini-journals.  I'm not very good with needles and I didn't follow any sewing pattern - just went up and down the holes until I was sure my pages were held securely together.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these journals yet. I'll probably use them for some quotes and doodles.  I'm thinking along the lines of black and white designs, as they already have too much colour on the background. We'll see. At the moment, I just like looking at them the way they are!



Here's a brilliant tutorial on YouTube by Sea Lemon, that explains this journal binding process much better than I have done!


2 comments:

  1. Ok I officially love your blog. Excellent tips ... Yippee.

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  2. I love how vivid these are. We just bought some acrylic sprays for Kapiti Art & Heart so I am going to try them.

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