Comfortable Shoes Studio

the project of AWESOME

Okay I've written ever so briefly about this before but I'm on it again. Sara of GIRLSCANTELL website and etsy shop and I are collaborating on some some pocket sized journals. Yeah, if I say so myself AWESOME!

Sara creates these fantastic designs based on diagrams. Essentially she draws something then diagrams it. They are super cool and fantastic. I'm not alone in my love of anatomic diagrams, as she has one of the human heart and it's superb.

What we did was exchange some items- and I've snet her some uncut untrimmed cover material. She then printed on them with a variety of silkscreens and in a variety of colors and mailed them back to me.

Sometimes in the next few weeks I'll pair the covers with fantastic papers and stitch them into great jotters. Pricing will be determined later and we'll both have them up in our etsy shops.

I love collaborations like this. I love to see what other people do with my jotters. I know that they are great bases for expression as many of mine have doodles and decorations on the covers. It's just great seeing what someone else does with the same materials.

some pictures below:

The opened envelope!

brains! This will make 2 small jotters!


Vintage typewriter goodness!

Update, More jotters on etsy and the transfer

It looks as thought the domain transfer is going to go through without too many hiccups... I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one. I've seen sites down for a full week while the transfer goes through. I'm doing it because the new fees are lower than what I was paying for a comparable amount of bandwidth, plus I don't have to pay and additional fee for banner free hosting. So far so good, knock on wood!!! (I get get 2 years for less than what I was paying for one...)

I've loaded some more graph paper jotters up to etsy. You can see them here.

I've been kind of on unofficial hiatus from making books. Spring sun, gardening, guests etc all have made me kind of step away from it. I rather needed a bit of a break to refocus my energies anyway. I need a break every now and then. I have an order for a custom book which I think is a great way to get back into making books- focus on a creative challenge. I've also decided that I'm going to do some book reviews. I have a shelf full of books on art, journaling and making books so I'm going to make my way through the shelves, give a little overview on each book. The rating system will be 1-5 Binder's needles and 1-2 paint covered thumbs up or down. 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the highest. I also plan on compiling a page of "must have" books. I got started this week with an Alisa Golden book.  (You can see that review below)

A BIG Order

I've been working on a big order. 90 of my jotter notebooks for a wedding*. Luckily for me I managed to snag a massive stack of posters to recycle shortly before receiving the order. I got some good posters too, with interesting graphics.

I've been holding off on stitching up the second half of the books though because our dog, Ruby, HATES the sewing machine and I've been thinking that it might just be too traumatic for her to have the new dog and me sewing...

But I've been cutting and trimming like crazy the last few nights. I had stitched enough for 100 books. Thus far after trimming and cutting about 2/3rds of the stack I've only got 50 books. I've got a stack of 20 rejects- loose or bad stitching or bad cutting. I'll be listing reject value packs on etsy when I'm all done with the order.

*I used to work in the flower business and no matter what I did I always ended up with wedding business. In flowers brides are often difficult and I always hated doing wedding flowers. The issue, I was really good at it and word got out around town that my prices were fair and that I did a great job. In the entire time of doing wedding flowers I had only 1 bride freak out, and it was determined by everyone involved that she and her crazy sister were looking for free flowers. That one instance sticks out in my mind and still bothers me. I'm so glad that I don't work with flowers anymore. Not to mention that when you work with flowers you really ruin the romantic gestures of flowers for yourself. Getting flowers never seems to have that feeling it once did.

Notebookism, you kick ass

Armand, over at Notebookism has given me a feature for  my jotters. If you are at all interested in paper things, like notebooks and pens along with the various goods that goes along with them checkout Notebookism, it's one of my daily reads.

Also if your looking for more pictures of my jotters, it's the next entry down, but if you're impatient here's a link to my etsy page where you can peruse all of the new packs.

quick update

Yesterday I spent the evening collating pages with covers. I had spent some time this weekend breaking down a a large quantity of posters from the large 3'x4' state to small 8.5"x11" cover pieces. It was crazy. I have a stack of covers about a foot high. Yeah it's a lot of covers. So last night I collated a full ream of paper to a few of the covers, and then clipped them into place. Tonight I hope I'll have the energy to stitch up a few books.

My boss gave me quite a few really cool posters so I'm hoping to have a few really awesome covers, so far from what I've seen they will be very cool. There were a lot of very cool color combinations- pinks and browns, tans and greens, etc... This crop of advertising is lighter and airier than some of the darker and more sedate posters I've had in the past.

Last night I trimmed a few I had stitched a couple of weekends ago and I had screwed up on about half of them, not in the trimming aspect but the stitching. I'd had a few issues with my sewing machine. It's amazing to me how much I abuse the thing but how the relatively simple technology can be fixed easily.

Sewing Cradles Available Again!!!

In other excellent news. I talked to my Father about the whole sewing cradle thing. My brother really dropped the ball on it. I love the kid and while he's a bit of a genius in some areas he's really not in other areas, one of them being customer satisfaction and service. I was told by a fellow bookbinder and BEST member that my brother never got back to her about a sewing cradle, while I was mortified and embarrassed my brother claimed he had gotten back to her. Though somehow I doubt it. So I chatted with my dad, told him about the issue and he said he'd set up shop and make 50 or so of them. The other deal will be that he'll bring them to me when he comes to visit next, which should be in a month or so. After which I'll have all the cradles here and I'll be shipping them.

So starting now, sewing cradles are available again. He's piecing the 50 together slowly but surely and I'll have them in my grubby little hands next month. However my Father is much more reliable than my brother and can be trusted to ship them from his farm in Maine. So as of now he has one completely finished and ready to go, I'll be listing it on etsy in the next few days and then as he makes more I'll list them too. He'd like to have a few go up on eBay but I'm reluctant to do that. But we'll see.

So yay for new well built solid pine cradles. I will post about this again as more become available!!!

Price will be $32.99+ $10 shipping (in the US

Chapbook from 1999

I made this book in collaboration with a friend of mine. It is pretty much the only book I've made in collaboration with anyone. It's a pretty simple Japanese stab style binding. Done with black cotton crocheting thread. The stations were bored with a dremel. The fore edge of each page is the folded edge of the sheet of paper. at the time of printing I had a ancient bubble jet. I was working some place where once a week I had unfettered access to the photocopy machine... I made zines then too. I printed the text, took it to work, copied the pages onto my really nice paper took them home and printed by hand all the little block prints then collated and folded every book, clamped and drilled holes then stitched it all up. The whole process took a long long time. My friend and I were mailing back and forth a notebook with the images and text, until we had everything agreed upon, then I typed it all up and emailed it to my friend, she tweaked the text, then I made it fit onto the page.

I've got to say that this was a great project, I love how the final product came out. I think we made a total of 100 books. The cost was a lot though. I was really poor at the time of us making this as was my friend, I want to say that we spent about $50 getting this thing going and never made any money on it. I still have a stack of the books. I sold a few on eBay and my friend had the other half of them and I've still got a stack of them.

I still thing that they are really cool.

MY first Hedgehog ever

This is the first hedgehog I ever made. It's a 3.5x5.5 inch 100 page hardcovered book, with a long stitch binding. The elastic on it is completely gone- a strip of braiding with hard little lumps. The leather along the spine is from a recycled totally sweet 1970's jacket I snagged at goodwill in Bangor Maine. IT had holes and it made great red brown books. Anyway Check it out

Work(art) Capacity Week 4

I was reading an article about work capacity. It’s a physics concept that I haven’t thought much about since I was in high school but it’s one of those great concepts that really can apply to so much more than just physics. The article that I was reading was about working out and being able to more than the next person when you need to but I was thinking how can I apply that concept to art, because really it doesn’t matter too much to me if I can’t relate it to art.

So I got to thinking what can I do to increase my work (art) capacity. I came up with 4 items to do so. For the next 4 weeks I’m going to post a new work(art) capacity item.

#4 Use your tools. We all have a variety of tools available to us, many save time. I saved a lot of time taking my finished book blocks to staples and having them trim them for me. I spent $4 but saved an hour. In my mind $4 is worth it. I have templates I use in my studio for cutting my basic covers; I save a lot of time by not having to measure them out each time. Ebay has templates you can use, you set up a basic template of an item your going to sell a lot of cut and paste what’s different each time and wow- it takes what used to be a 20 minute process and condensed it down to 5. I keep text documents on my computer of listings I have for etsy. I have a generic text for each of my book styles and add the differences of the item to the listing, as I need to.

These are simple examples of things I do to increase my work capacity so I can make more books.

Youtube Video of my First coptic book

Here's a little video I made of my first coptic book. Imade it back in 2002. I used it to brainstorm on bookmaking patterns ideas etc. I'm still working out issues with my new web cam and when I figure it out more fully I expect my videos to look a lot better.