when i travel, i save all of the ephemera i collect: receipts, ticket stubs, transportation passes, museum guides… i bring it all home. i usually don’t do much with it, but i recently made a few trip journals with ephemera that i brought home from my trips to new york and seattle.

keep reading, and i’ll show you how to turn this:

into this:

materials needed:

• trip ephemera
• cutting mat and craft or exact-o knife
• ruler
• needle
• bookbinding thread (or waxed dental floss!)
• binder clip

first, chose which materials you’d like to include in our journal. then use the biggest item to determine what the size of the journal will be. the interior items in the journal can be smaller, but what you chose for your front and back covers should be the same size.

for my new york book, i used part of a museum guide for the front cover (upper left corner), and part of a muji shopping bag for the back cover (lower right corner).

before you put all the pages together, score the front cover. this will give the cover the fold where you want it to be. about an inch or so from the left edge, place the ruler parallel to where you’d like the score, and lightly use the dull side of a butter knife to create the line, using the ruler as a guide:

next: order your pages, and use a binder clip to keep them in place. make sure all pieces are flush left. i also made them all flush to the bottom edge of the journal as well.

now, create a punching guide. cut a piece of paper the height of the book, and the width is determined by the score location. using a ruler and pencil, draw a line down the middle of your guide. then create 4 perpendicular lines, evenly spaced. gently work the awl through the 4 intersections:

thread your needle, and start the sewing. we’re using a japanese stab binding technique. essentially, the thread will pass through each hole 3 times.

i always start with the bottom hole. i put the needle from the back into the front, leaving the tail of the thread at the back of the book. then i loop the thread down and around the bottom edge, back into the hole i just came from. then i loop around the left edge and back into that first hole. i’ve passed through that hole 3 times. then i move up to the next hole (#2). when i leave that hole, i go around the left edge, back into the hole. then i move up to hole #3, go around the left edge, and then up to hole #4. at hole #4, i go around the left edge, then around the top edge, and then start to work my way back down to hole #1.

(the bookbinding etsy street team has a great list of japanese stab binding tutorials if my simplified instructions aren’t clear.)

when you get back to hole #1, don’t go through it, but run the needle under the first stitch to prepare for the bind-off:

to finish, tie off the thread with a square knot (right over left, left over right). cut the thread, but leave at least 1/4 inch. if you cut right to the knot, you increase the chance of the knot coming undone.

and now you have a little book, full of memories of your last trip.

this entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 6:37 am and is filed under make it!. you can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.