A friend of mine got married recently, and instead of buying her a proper present, I made a book. It's supposed to be an address book, but I think it's just a notebook, or something. In any case, the idea was that it would be something they could use in starting their joint life together, a little more personal than a blender or a set of Pottery Barn glasses.
The cover is very thin cardboard, two pieces laminated together for each side and covered with red paper. It's coptic bound with some funny little crochet thread that has a little bit of gold plastic wound in it, which kind of sucked trying to pull it through the holes, but I think I have some sort of pathological need to include something gold in each project, so it had to stay. I folded the pocket and slapped it on there, nothing too fancy. I like the angle it's cut at, although it's not quite right, the edge of the pocket doesn't quite cover the white paper on the inside of the cover. That said, however, I love that there's a pocket. I love pockets--pockets for everyone and everything, I say!
I guess the reason it's not a real address book is that I didn't put lines, or address tabs with the alphabet on it. I really cheated them on that front, but I was running out of time and patience and sanity . . . Although, to be honest, whenever I have an address book, I don't really use it to its full capacity. I feel like there are always letters that never get used, and it seems kind of silly, somehow, to have just one name sitting alone on a page. This may, however, be because I only know about twelve people, total, in the whole world, two of whom refuse to give me their home addresses.
This, like the little pink book I posted about previously, is a sort of slap-dash production. The Yes! paste and the red paper came from Michael's, but excepting that, almost everything in the book was begged, borrowed, or reappropriated. My dad gave me the cardboard, the paper is drawing paper from a big sketch book and trimmed with a tiny little razor blade I found in my kitchen, using the back of the sketchbook as a mat, because my little mat was nowhere near big enough. The holes were poked with a large needle instead of an awl, and the curved needle I used was one my dad had around for sewing boat sails. The stamps are borrowed from my mom. (My favorite is the little pointing hand, don't ask me why.) So, in a sense, it really became an exercise in making do, in maximizing what few resources I did have. It's not perfect, but I think it looks pretty good for something I just sort of pulled together out of the ether. And it has a pocket, so there's always that.
