Remains of the Day

At last, I'm ready to show y'all what I've been making with my new sewing machine. Just before Christmas, I signed up for an online course called "Remains of the Day" being taught by the wonderfully talented Mary Ann Moss. It's all about making journals out of paper and fabric. If you follow this link, you can read about the class and watch a 40 second video giving a demo about what we are doing: http://dispatchfromla.typepad.com/dispatch_from_la/rotdoci.html

This has to be the funnest $60 I have ever spent. Once you are registered for the class, you have access to the very entertaining class blog and 27 instructional videos (about 4 to 8 minutes long each) and several PDF downloads of information and usefulness. We also have a Flickr group where everyone is posting their (totally amazing) photos and a Yahoo group where we are chatting away, sharing ideas and making friends. Mary Ann is a great teacher, very amusing and absolutely fearless when it comes to putting her journals together, it is very inspirational to see how she works. She calls it "guerrilla sewing" and that's exactly how it feels, we take no prisoners!!

A friend who is also taking the course came for an overnight craft play date/visit last week and we had great fun putting the outside covers of our journals together with fabric that I had picked up at Fabricland, the Salvation Army and Goodwill.

This first cover I made is red, black and white. Mostly because that was the colour of the fabric I had on hand. The first photo above shows what the cover looks like folded up and tied shut. The next two photos are what it looks like lying flat.

I made the inside of the cover out of a piece of white silk and it ended up being rather simple looking inside (in Mary Ann's version, there is a lot more stitching showing on the inside), which I don't mind, but I did end up adding a pocket on the inside flap with a picture of the Eiffel Tower, as a reminder of the fact that in just 228 days, I'll be in Paris. I intend to use this journal for the month of January and to make a new one for each month of this year.

Once the cover is made, we make journal pages to put inside the cover. These pages are made out of just about any paper we might have on hand - old ledger pages, cards, pages ripped from magazines, you name it. You know those envelopes your bills come in, that have the interesting patterns inside and the clear plastic windows over your address? They're called security envelopes and I never looked at them as closely as I do now - some of those patterns are quite lovely! (There's even Flickr group where they are collecting pictures of the patterns from around the world - who knew? http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephking/sets/72157594547931731/) They play a big part in the journal pages. I'll post some photos in a later blog.

Suddenly, every scrap of paper and fabric is a potential addition to this journal (or the next 3 or 100 I'm going to make). I've really enjoyed myself this past week and I'm sad that I have to go back to work tomorrow, as that will take me away from my sewing machine but on the plus side, you wouldn't believe how many of those security envelopes arrive every day to my office and would normally get thrown out - so if you see someone under the receptionist's desk, rooting through her recycling bin, that will be me!