The last three journals...

The last three journals: Crazily Paisley, Flying Cloud, Four of a Kind...

OK, so it's been forever since I've posted. Forever enough that I've got three journals you haven't seen. These are a new thing for me, in a way, yet in another way, they're a very old thing... They are small journals, bound with artists canvas, much like the journal that got me started into bookbinding... Transformer, from 1993. This journal...

The very plain Transformer, which never got painted...

I bought it at Whole Foods and loved it... I never painted it, though, and it started to come out of its covers after being carried in my backpack for seven months. These photos show some of the damage:

The one on the left shows the split at the hinge. The reason it split is visible in the next photo... I pack too much ephemera into my journals, which causes that 'V' effect. It's kind of like your journal has gained ten pounds and it's still trying to fit into its favorite shirt, its cover... Because I still like to paste ephemera into my journals, I now make journals to accommodate the extra 'weight.'

Here's the first of the new journals. They're all split-board bindings. The covers are all painted before the boards are covered.

Crazily Paisley!

This was an experiment in using day glow paints, which is why the book is glowing. I airbrushed the background, the green part. The endsheets are also day glow, just stripes painted on paper.

Rear endsheet, showing pocket....

Endsheets of Flying Cloud, that's her, the clipper ship.

The next journal was Flying Cloud... I've always loved clouds... My Dad and I used to stop when we saw a really cool cloud when I was a kid. More recently, when we went to the beach, we stayed at a house that had a set of coffee mugs with pictures of clipper ships on them, among them the Cutty Sark and Flying Cloud. Flying Cloud was the fastest clipper ship in her day, and held the speed record for traveling from New York City to San Francisco for 136 years. Even more amazing was that the navigator on that record-breaking sail was a woman, Eleanor Creesy, wife of the Captain, Josiah Perkins Creesy.

My latest journal is Four of a Kind. I found a ten of hearts on the ground on one of my recent walks and got fascinated with doing images of cards. Ah ha, you're probably saying, there are only THREE cards on the cover. The fourth card is on the endsheets... I used a beaded headband on this cover. I think they're really lovely.

I'm really having fun with the hand painted covers. The journals are pretty tiny for me. I'm doing the pages nine out of sheets of Hahnemühle Schiller: each sheet is about 11 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches, more or less, so the page is half that. I have trouble writing in columns in these journals... But I do it anyway.

Pages from Flying Cloud...