My newest journal was inspired by a find in the trading zone in my building. Many of you will know that all sorts of gems can be found there if you visit it regularly and are quick to pounce on the good stuff. Lucky for me, I pass it everyday on my way out of the building and, since I often leave before 7am, I'm one of the first to pass it in the morning (which seems to be prime picking time). Now, I don't often take items from there (though I love decluttering and leaving stuff there), but once in a while something catches my eye and is worthy of being brought upstairs. I've happily claimed office supplies, labels, a few 1L Mason jars, some Christmas ornaments, and two juicers (I kept one and gave one to a friend who has been wanting one for a long time). On rare occasions, I've also found craft supplies there.
The craft supplies I found recently were thin, pre-cut pieces of wood from Michaels. Ok. Confession time. When I say "recently," I actually mean that I found them sometime in the past two years. I rediscovered them in February of this year while doing some organizing in my office. Among the pieces were two small plaques and three door hangers. I took them initially thinking that I would use them to practice wood burning. That never happened. And when I did see them again in February, I thought that the two plaques would make a nice set of covers for a notebook -- something a little more rustic, perhaps for a cottage. Instead of burning an image on one of them, I decided to pick up a wooden cutout from Michaels to give the cover some dimension. The anchor, purchased back in March or April, sat on my sideboard for a few months before I was so motivated to finish the intended project.
Now, back when I first got into wood burning (during the mono period), I decided that I needed a dremel-type tool for drilling small holes in the pieces of wood I was using. My parents gave me one for Christmas that year and I put it with my craft supplies, but a project for which it was needed never really materialized -- until about three weeks ago. I decided it was time to finish the anchor notebook and, of course, I would need to drill holes in the wooden covers to be able to stitch them onto the notebook. I unboxed the dremel-style tool and was thrilled to find that it had held its charge after more than a year (amazing, no?). I quickly marked off where the holes would go, clipped the two pieces together using binder clips, and drilled the holes.
What. A. Feeling. I now understand why men love power tools. The sound. The rpm. The power. This was far more satisfying than punching a hole through a piece of heavy cardboard using an awl and brute force. The bit passed through the two pieces of wood like they were butter. In the blink of an eye, I had perfect little holes through which to pass my binding needle. I felt triumphant as I lightly sanded the cover.
I had seen a tutorial recently (again, a relative term -- sometime in the past six months) where the individual making a notebook put a different colour of paper on the outside of each signature and I decided this would work for the anchor notebook. I chose a seafoam green and prepared my folios and signatures. And then I sat down to stitch it together.
