New things!

As we're going to have to do a major clear out when mum moves in with us sort of Julyish, and many of the things which will have to go are books, magazines and other printed stuff including my massive collection of children's Christmas comic annuals, Snoopy and Mad books I've decided to try to reuse as much as possible.

I'm not known for my green credentials I'm afraid, but my new project might get me a few green points. I'm going to use the books etc to cover and make notebooks and journals. Mainly covering, so I won't exactly be using much recycled material, but it's a start!
I bought a few cheap A6 hardback notebooks and covered my first one today with a page from a street atlas of Manchester which I thought was appropriate. It took rather a long time, but I thing it's worked well! I bought some clear glaze to protect the paper and I'm doing a test on another book making project from a few months ago. It's smelly and drying at the moment.

I used regular white craft glue which for a non-making person like myself is a nice non-threatening material! The paper in the notebooks is rather thin and the glue rather wet, which isn't the best combination in the world, so the first and last pages of the books seem a bit wrinkly to me. I'm not quite sure how to stop the thin pages from going like this. Also the most tricky part of the process was working out how to get the paper wrapped over the top of the spine and sort of wrapped back inside the spin. It's not worked terribly well, certainly not well enough to sell. Yet. I'll end up with mountains of slightly crappy little notebooks all over the place while I try to find a solution!

Sales!

I've made two sales this morning! Huzzah!

One was a set of Moroccan words on walls postcards and another my Liberty and Friends print which I wrote about last week. I'll have to remake the postcards in a different way as I need to put my new logo on the back, as these still have the old one and my brilliant new printer for some reason prints in a rather smeary way on the backing card I've been using for the postcards. I'll need to have a bit of a play around to see if I can find a solution for that, I made a whole new and lovely set of postcards on Wednesday and had to turn them into greetings cards as the backs smudged. I've learned from that little mistake!

I'm very pleased indeed.

I bought a nice little square white metal frame at the weekend as I thought I'd see if I have any interest in small framed prints. The image is only 3" which is really sweet. I made one (in a different frame) for a friend's birthday last week and she really liked it and said that she was going to commission me to make one for a friend of hers. So I'm hoping that I might be on to a good thing. The frame is glazed with acrylic which obviously makes it lighter and safer for postage and it will need much less packaging than if it were glass which will keep the shipping costs down. I'll be wrapping a mock-up parcel later and going to visit the nice ladies at the Post Office to ask them for the price to various places, then I'll know that I'm not overcharging my lovely customers.