Back online! (& Corey’s bookbinding project!)

Such a relief to have home internet back, finally!  I can’t believe it took 2 weeks to fix, but I’m not going to complain too loudly, in case they snatch it back again…!  It’s going  to take me a few days to catch up on all the stuff I just wasn’t able to do whilst borrowing free wi-fi in cafes etc, but then hopefully, everything will be back to relatively normal…

In the meantime, here’s a post I wanted to share with you last week, but couldn’t upload the info.

Corey is not generally the crafty type, but living with me he can’t help but hear about at least some of the ideas I come up with, and clearly I have managed to firmly plant the goodness-of-re-purposing concept in his head, with or without him realising it…!

He was producing a booklet/promo pack, to send out to promoters with regard to a trio he has put together. He wrote it, printed it all out, then came to the problem of binding it. We don’t actually own a long-arm stapler, because although I seem to spend most of my life producing booklets of one type or another, I hand-stitch the bindings. However, Corey is not one to be deterred by such minor inconveniences. He thought to himself, “I need a stapler. I know: a paperclip is like a giant staple.” Really? Well, yes – if you make it so.

I’ve just written a zine called ‘Cover-button Moon’ (full details to follow shortly), which is – perhaps unsurprisingly – all about cover-buttons – how to make them, & things to do with them. I wanted to include some buttons with the zine, so I extended the zine covers, and pressed 3 buttons down the right hand side. I then threaded a piece of string through the button loops on the reverse, to seal the zine closed.   Then I thought, actually, if I space the buttons closer together, instead of securing the buttons with string, I could use – you guessed it! – a large paperclip. (I hadn’t mentioned this to Corey, by the way.)  Great minds, and all that…

I’ll post a tutorial for the above button closure once I’ve made up a sample with photos, but in the meantime, here is the ridiculously simple paperclip binding a la Corey:


This tutorial will be added as a PDF to the Freebies section.

Rain

Rain by Kirsty Gunn (an extract)

When the rain came
it came at first as the
scent of rain,
the grey air stained
darker
behind the hills.

Then
when it came down to us
it was like thread and needles,
piercing the jellyish water
with a trillion tiny pricks,
the silver threads
attaching water to sky

‘Rain’ is actually a novel by Kirsty Gunn.  The above poem is Kirsty Gunn’s prose with a few extra line breaks, to make it look like poetry instead. It reads like poetry, whatever the formation of the words, so I thought, why not?  This prose-poem  is part of a non-crafty TangledPress project I am working on, but I thought I would share it here, given the relevant imagery it uses.

P.S. I’m having some printer trouble at the moment, but should be sorted by the end of the week.  I have a couple of new things ready to see the light of day, so watch this space at the beginning of next week for updates…!