We're off to Montreal soon, and as I like to do I've made a book to use as a travel diary / scrap book on the trip.
Because it's designed to have things stuck into it, I didn't use a traditional book structure, like I did when I made a scrapbook for Sim: the levels of faffing required to put guards between all the pages (so that adding extra thicknesses of paper doesn't make the text block thicker than the spine) is relatively high, particularly when you then have to cut sheets of paper to insert alongside each of the guards while you're pressing it (so that the spine isn't thicker than the text block...).
Instead, I made something more like the book I made for Japan, but simpler and using scrap materials. In fact, I used the left-over strips from cutting the covers for the bookbinding workshop I ran at Eastercon (and completely forgot to post about until I wanted to link to it!), and the design was also very similar, but extended.
At the moment, the trailing ribbon ends are just loosely plaited together, to keep them out of the way. I'm hoping that I'll find all sorts of cool bits and pieces to tie and thread onto them, during the trip.
The cover is made from three off-cuts of Ingres, folded into zig-zags with a section sewn into each one:
The strips of Ingres are only stuck together at the foredge of the cover, because I wanted to be able to poke things - temporarily or permanently - into the covers as I go along. There's also a smaller strip of Ingres stuck inside each cover, partly for stability and partly to form another pocket where bits and pieces can be tucked.
The pages throw up a lot when the book is opened flat, because the spine has nothing to stop it from pulling into an arch, but I quite like the effect so I'm not too worried about stopping it!
The scrap book part of the process has already started: the cover currently features several of the Little Canadia images from KoL!
