Rough and ready recycled notebooks

As some of you may know by day I work in an Italian coffee shop, and because it's fairy new we've still not been able to set up all the recycling facilities that I would like to see. As a result all the staff have been making an effort to reuse and recycle anything useful that normally would be thrown away. One lady has been taking home honey-jars to put her preserves in, another has been taking home and painting our unwanted jam jars. I've been concentrating on collecting all the interesting paper that is used as packing material. Our deliveries come straight from Italy, and for some reason the Italian suppliers use interesting, and sometimes beautiful, papers to wrap delicate items. Gathering them up I noticed that the papers included pictures of smiling housewives, ice-cream cones, footprints, meat products, cows and pastoral scenes. It seemed like a tragedy to throw that paper away, so I've been re-purposing it and binding it into notebooks using cardboard packaging to create hard covers. The technique is really simple, all you need are basic sewing skills, and after a bit of practice you can create something beautiful, unusual and useful in under an hour.

Inspiration for this project comes from Esther K. Smith and her fantastic book How to Make Books. If you like the idea of sewing or folding your own books then I highly recommend her book.

You will need:

Plain or printed packing paper

A thin cardboard box with a nice printed design on the front. Anything that catches your eye.

Pencil, ruler and scissors

A thumb-tack or noticeboard pin

A large needle

Brightly coloured thread

Bulldog clips (also known as butterfly clips)

Begin by choosing a cover for you notebook. Any thin cardboard box will make a great cover. Consider the size of notebook you are hoping for and carefully cut separate front and back covers for your notebook making sure that they are of equal size.

To make the pages of your notebook measure your cover. Each page should measure the same height as the cover, but double the width. From my experience twelve pages cut in this way makes a nice size of notebook. Fold each page in half widthways and stack them together so that the folded edges face left. Already you can begin to see the notebook taking shape!

Before you can start binding the pages together it's a good idea to prep the covers by scoring them where the notebook needs to be hinged. Measure 1 ½ cm (or 1inch) from the left-hand edge, mark this with pencil and score gently with a pair of scissors. Gently bend each cover along this scored line to make sure your notebook can be easily opened.

Now you can start putting the notebook together! Put the front cover on top of your stack of pages and the back cover behind. Check that all the pages are facing the right way and then line the whole thing up as neatly as you can by tapping the spine on a flat surface. Secure the stack in place with bulldog clips on the top, bottom and on the right-hand edge. Leave the left-hand side free so you have room to sew. If you think the bulldog clips might dent the covers then use pieces of scrap paper to cushion the clips.

To begin piercing the spine find the mid-point along the fold you created in the front cover. You can measure this or judge by eye. Press a thumb-tack into the fold. Make sure you do this on a soft surface! Flip the book over and press the thumb-tack into the back of the hole you just created, just to make sure the hole is clear and will be easy to sew through. Now measure the mid-point between the central hole and the top of the book. Pierce another hole in the fold the same way as the first. Finally repeat the process by finding the mid-point between the central hole and the bottom of the book. You should now have three equally spaced holes along the spine, like this:

Now you can bind everything together. Thread a large needle with 1 ½ metres or so of brightly coloured thread and thread the needle through the central hole, front to back. Leave a tail of thread on the front of the book, this can be tied off later. Once through, bring the needle to the front of the book again and thread it again front to back, creating a loop which wraps around the spine.

Turn the book over and thread the needle through the lower hole, back to front. You will see you have begun to create a mixture of horizontal and vertical threads, the horizontal wrapping around the spine and the vertical following the line of the fold. Re-pierce the lower hole, back to front once again, and you will have created a horizontal thread for this hole too.

In order the finish the bottom of the notebook you need to complete the vertical thread, to do this simply bring the needle down to the bottom of the book and re-pierce the lower hole one final time, back to front. The thread should follow the fold around the bottom of the book, like this:

The thread should now be at the front of the book, so put the book face-up again and thread the central hole again, front to back. Take the needle up to the upper hole and, as with the lower, pierce it back to front twice to bind it horizontally. To complete the upper half of the book bring the needle upper over the top of the book so that the thread follows the line of the fold. Pierce the upper hole a final time, back to front. All there is left to do is to tie the working thread to the tail left at the central hole. The thread should look as pictured without any doubling-up or any gaps. Release the bulldog clips and your notebook is complete!

Once you get more confident you can try to incorporate buttons and beads into you design, or can can experiment with more unusual binding patterns.

Beautiful Baskets

Over the past few weeks me and my friend Carolyn have been trying our best to find a way to recycle all the carrier bags we've collected by weaving them into baskets. With no prior weaving experience I got some inspiration from fellow blogger Michelle of Conserve Plastic Bags. In one of her posts she suggested coiling the plastic bags and provided a link to nativetech.org, a fantastic website with detailed instructions on Native American weaving techniques. This is how I transferred those techniques for use with plastic bags. It was great fun and I hope you enjoy the tutorial.


To make a recycled plastic bag basket you will need scissors, a bodkin or large tapestry needle, plenty of clear tape, around forty carrier bags (depending on the size of the basket) and garden twine. While looking for garden twine I found a fantastic product called DYNA-TIE which i think is only available in the UK. It's a strong plastic strip that comes in lengths of a hundred meters for only 50p, and the colour is pretty too!




To start the basket you first need to prepare the carrier bags so that they take the place of a bundle of pine needles. Begin by laying the bag on a flat surface and smoothing out. If the bag has handles which extend upwards carefully cut these off to create an even rectangular shape. Keep these as they will turn out to be useful later. Before you start rolling the bag I've found it helps a lot to cut a few strips of tape so they are to hand.



Roll the bag from the closed end as tightly and evenly as possible. Once you reach the top quickly tape the roll in place, first securing the middle and both ends and then adding tape to smooth out ragged edges. You should be left with a long thin bundle perfect for weaving with.



Now I think it's probably best I hand you over to the capable hands at nativetech.org to explain the first stages of weaving. These diagrams are beautifully clear and explain the process so much better than my blurry photography ever could!

Unwind a length of garden twine to begin work. At first it won't be necessary to thread the twine onto a needle. Leave a small gap at the top of the plastic-bag-bundle and as shown wind the garden twine around the bundle to create a section around 2" long which is entirely covered in twine (steps 2 and 3). Carefully fold this section in half to form a loop and with help from a little more tape seal the loop (step 4). Now you can begin the first 'round'. Fold the carrier-bag-bundle around the central loop so that you begin to create the spiral shape. Passing the twine around the outside and through the centre you will create a strong central ring.



You should continue to bind the central ring in this way for one full rotation, and then you can begin to work the second round. For this round, and all the rest that were to follow I found that the interlocking stitch was the best option. If you are using garden twine which is more fibrous then you might find that the split stitch is stronger.



To form the second round continue to wrap the plastic bag around the central ring in a spiral, but instead of passing the twine through the centre thread the twine onto your needle and use the interlocking stitch. Thread the twine through the loop of each stitch in the foundation ring, passing the needle from front to back. The stitches should be even and close. In this way the whole basket is made up. To insert a new plastic bag simply roll and tape as before and tape to the previous bundle with an overlap of around half an inch for extra security.




As you work round you'll find the basket grows quickly! At this stage you could also easily use your spiral as a colourful place-mat.

Once you feel the base is large enough you just need to begin working upwards. This is a lot easier than it sounds! Simply lay the next round on top of the previous one and, still using the interlocking stitch, pass the twine from the inside of the basket to the outside.


Once your basket is of a height you like the only thing to add are the handles. For mine I decided that the best thing to use would be the leftover handles from all the bags I'd been using! To do this flatten out the handle and roll, as with the bags, to form a miniature bundle. Create nine of these in a variety of colours and set them out int groups of three. Tape each group of three end-to-end to create three long thin bundles and then plait them together. This plaited length should be long enough to make a good handle.


Pass each end of the handle through the basket, two rounds below the top layer, and then tape the loose ends together. Make this connection nice and secure. To finish lift up the loops of handle inside and outside the basket and hold them together. Bind them in this position, as close as possible to the top of the basket, with more twine.




The great thing about baskets made in this way is that they are waterproof and very flexible. When I first started weaving my basket I was worried about the base holding its shape, but now it's finished I've found that the flexibility means that the base bows beautifully, creating a lovely pear-shape. Here are some more pictures of the finished result, which I'm intending to use as a laundry basket.


Once Carolyn has finished weaving hers I might include some pictures of hers too. As well as weaving more closely than I have she's been very creative in working an oval shape into the base of the basket, giving it a very different style.

I hope you've enjoyed the tutorial. If you have any questions about how the basket was made please let me know.

Vintage Crafting

I always find living museums inspire me to craft. Getting a glimpse into the way people lived only 100 years ago always reminds me of the utility of skills like sewing, weaving and knitting. It's easy to forget that lots of popular crafts arose out of a need to make use of every scrap of material that was available. Quilters now seem to spend a small fortune on fat quarters in co-ordinating colours, but in the past quilts were a thrifty use of fabric scraps too small to be fashioned into anything else.

Another craft that makes clever use of small scraps of fabric is rag-rugging. With a section of hessian, and a collection of cotton or wool scraps you can make a soft and colourful rug. Last week I went on a day trip to Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire, a recreation of a Shropshire town during the industrial revolution complete with railway, fairground and working high street. We saw demonstrations of metal working, candle making, baking and wood working but my attention was caught by a sample rag-rug kit. All the recreation homes in the town were furnished with rag rugs and I decided it would make a lovely souvenir of the day.

The kit came in a paper bag and contained a square of hessian (about 13" square), a wooden prodding tool and a bag of cotton strips, mostly of green white and pink. I ended up supplementing the fabric scraps with some of my own to add colour and also to use up some small pieces of fabric I had spare.

 

The method recommended in the instructions was to 'prod' the fabric through the hessian from the back of the work rather than to hook it through from the front.It was very quick and easy to create rows of prodded strips.

To finish the rug I folded the 1" allowance back and sewed it into place. The instructions suggested using fabric glue for a no-sew option. The final result is lovely, if a little small.

The floral strips you can see this photo were offcuts from making bunting, something I'll be posting about next week.

I'd recommend the kit as a gift for anyone looking for some crafty inspiration. Now I know how easy rag-rugging is I'm determined to make a larger one for my living room, and I've certainly got a large enough collection of fabric scraps that would otherwise go to waste, so that's lucky!