craftgrrl | Long time, no post, I know. :) (Reply)

Went out letterboxing today with

seiryuu26, to Larrabee State Park, only a few minutes from the house. It's like geocaching, except you use word clues to find the box instead of GPS coordinates. It's like...low-carb geocaching. :) Actually, it's a great way to get started in outdoors treasure hunting, if you don't have a GPS yet.
Anyways, when you letterbox, one of the main differences from geocaching is that it focusses on stamping little "passport books" with a custom stamp that's unique to each letterbox. You bring along your own stamp pad, and if you want, your own stamp, because each box has a passport book that you can leave your own mark in. I'm having these (thanks

neogeen!) cut into stamps by this guy (only $3 each, unmounted, which is a PHENOMENAL price). They should be in the mail tomorrow, I'm so excited. :D
Rather than have just a "dollar store" spiral-bound notebook, I wanted to be a little more clever, and with some brave feelings of "I can do it!" (mostly from

craftgrrl), I made cool little custom books for myself, Seiryuu, and Soreth.

First, mine, with art from

ssthisto, from

furartxchange:

Seiryuu's, with art from

nambroth, in trade for a hematite war collar that I did for her:

The stuff I used to do it:

First, I printed out the covers on matte paper, just using my inkjet. For decent resolution, I went with about 400DPI. The colored bar along the top edge of the books was part of the picture! I think the sizes on these were 3.5" by 5". Anyways, cutting out the pictures, I spray-adhesived them to the 140LB watercolor paper (which has a neat texture, and is nice and stiff). I then covered the fronts, backs, and edges of this new card using four or five layers of Mod Podge. It's water resistant when it's dry, and it didn't bleed the printing at all. I then cut down the pages for my books using an old sketchbook (the white pages in the picture). I used 3 sheets of sketchbook paper, folded in half, and used 6 of these folded groups per book, making each book have 36 pages. The back covers of these are the back to an old sketchbook, covered with adhesive glittery paper (although anything would work). I then lined them up, marked where my holes would be, and used a hammer and a nail to punch out the five holes that would be stitched through. I sewed them together using friendship bracelet string (embroidery floss), although the binding page reccomends using upholstry or carpet thread. I thought this was more colorful and fun. My friend did a book and used hemp, which is really durable. This page is where I got the information on how to bind it.

As always, if you guys end up making anything like this, I'd be ALL ABOUT seeing your finished project!