Sewing a Journal with a Sewing Machine

Dana from Made Everyday has a fun tutorial on sewing paper journals. She uses a standard sewing machine and regular sewing thread. She shows you how to make a simple journal with a card stock cover, how to add pockets to a journal, how to sew with a decorative plastic sheet, how to make rounded corners, and how to add leather ties and elastic.

Note: Before you dive into sewing paper with a machine, you might want to test different stitch lengths to see which is the best for the paper you plan to use.

Journal-Making Supplies

Need supplies to make your own journals? Below is a list of arts and crafts items that are great additions to a maker's nook or studio. [Some of the links below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission, at no additional cost to you.  As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.] 

Free Art Images

There are many ways to get free images to print out and use in arts and crafts projects. For creating a journal, you could use a favorite painting or print image for your journal cover, special pockets, or inside pages. Use them as section separators, or add text and images on top of them.

Click on the links below to discover what you can print out and use:

Want more inspiration and choices for your journal? Find some wonderful arts and crafts supplies and ideas at the Blick Art Store and Joann Fabrics. Or click on the images below to purchase on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases (at no extra cost to you). For more about affiliates, please read our disclosure.

Linocut Printing by Maarit Hanninen

Photo: Flower linocut by Maarit Hanninen via Instagram

Maarit Hanninen is an artist and printmaker based in Amsterdam.

Her lino prints are based on dense, fine line drawings, which have to be converted from paper sketch to the surface of the linoleum, and then carved out of the linoleum to create the positive and negative areas of the image.

Maarit has created several videos which show her step-by-step processes for lino cutting and printing. 

Her videos, below, show the care it takes to transform a drawing into a fine art printed image. She transfers an image onto a soft, pliable material with sharp tools that can create a variety of cuts – from small, precise incisions to broad scoops.

MAARIT'S PROCESS 

Sometimes Maarit’s process involves adding pencil lead to the back of a drawing and then using that lead to transfer the image by tracing all the lines. 

Alternatively, you could place a piece of carbon paper between the drawing and the linoleum, tape down the drawing, and trace all the lines. Any lines that need to be better defined can then be touched up directly on the linoleum with a pencil or marker.

Maarit takes a step back part way through her carving, and uses a magic marker to draw out where the solid, intact areas remain. That way, she can see large areas that can be removed quickly with wider blades.

Next, she prepares the rag paper, and evenly rolls out some ink. She does a test run on a regular piece of paper, and eye-balls the print to see where she needs to do more carving, to add more definition through white space.

Supplies and books are available through our links below.

Another technique uses a printed image and wood glue, shown by Maarit in her video 'Inkjet Image Transfer': ​

Maarit also shows us how to create a multi-colored image, in the video below. She carefully marks up the areas to be carved away, and sets up a jig which assures that the colors will be printed in the proper areas when the paper is laid down more than once.  Here, she uses a round hand tool, or baren, to transfer the ink to the paper.

A couple of things to remember: the image as it appears while you’re carving will be flipped in the final printed piece; and, always protect your hands and fingers by carving away from you. Don't risk cutting your fingers - these linoleum cutter blades are sharp!

TURN YOUR DESIGNS INTO MULTIPLES

Linoleum prints are a wonderful way to make hand crafted multiples of an image. You'll be able to strike prints from your lino block for a long time, especially if you take good care of it. You can create art prints, stationery, posters, invitations, announcements, and more. You can also print an image multiple times on paper (to make repeating patterned wallpaper, for example), or onto fabric (using fabric paint) to be used to make clothes, textile art, home decor items, or quilts. Or, transfer the image directly onto an item, such as a t-shirt.

TAKING CARE OF YOUR LINOLEUM BLOCK

Your linoleum block can have a long lifespan and be used to create hundreds of prints before showing signs of wear. Your carved image will eventually wear down a bit - from being pressed, from abrasion from the papers printed on, from the humidity of the room where it's stored, and from solvent used to clean off ink. The key to keeping your carved image intact for a long time is to make sure you gently clean it properly after each use.

Properly cleaning your block involves removing the excess ink with a cloth lightly dampened with solvent, allowing the block to air dry, and then storing it flat - away from direct sunlight. You'll want to store it away from areas where there are extreme swings in humidity and temperature. You can further protect your block by wrapping it in kraft paper. 

If you're inspired to make a linoleum print or want to explore other forms of relief printing, you might want to add one of the books below to your crafting library, and build up your studio with printmaking supplies. 

A great way to dive in to printmaking is with a kit. If you need extra materials, you can view a wide range of lino blocks, inks, and tools here. Or click on any of the items below. (Please note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases - at no extra cost to you.)

You might also like our posts Modern Woodblock Printing, How to Make a Linoleum Block Print, and American Craftspeople.

LINO CUT SUPPLIES AND PRINT DESIGN BOOKS

The Sketchbook Project

The Sketchbook Project is an ongoing enterprise that promotes creativity. Anyone can contribute a sketchbook that can be viewed online, in a traveling exhibition, or in a Williamsburg, Brooklyn storefront library.

To be a part of this creative movement, you just need to purchase a sketchbook through the Project’s website, register it, fill up the pages, and mail it back. 

What you do to create your sketchbook can run the gamut - from writing text to making drawings, watercolors, collages, etc.

Since its founding as a non-profit organization in 2006, the Project has grown to include over 50,000 artists’ books, which have been contributed by 30,000+ artists from over 135 countries. Each book is 5" x 7”, with blank pages and a unique six-digit barcode, for cataloging and tracking purposes.

You can send a sketchbook any time of the year to be included in their library. But, if you want to have your sketchbook included in their popups, exhibitions, and installations that take place across North America, make sure to pay attention to their deadlines - in general, you'll need to order your sketchbook by mid-November and return it by the following mid-February to be included in special events.

You can submit a sketchbook after the deadline – it just won’t be included in the traveling exhibitions. It’ll be placed on the shelves of the Brooklyn library, available to be browsed.

​The Project suggests themes to consider each year. In 2019-2020, the suggested themes were: Daydream, Scenes From a Story, A Lasting Impression, An Untitled Sketchbook, Straighter Than Narrow, Pencil Me In, Legacy, Time Trapped, Anthem, Forget What Was Said, Expires in an Hour, I Used To, Drip and Drop, Tactile Qualities, Mixed Use, and A Visual Short Story of the Day We Left.

For their Vol. 17 Project, themes to consider are: Sunset Hues, Marks and Markers, Transparencies, Watercolor Whispers, Erasing Everything, Doodle a Daydream, Promises with Pencil, Great Stories in Graphite, Art Accident, Zig Zag, Cityscape Escape, and Mask and Tape.

When you purchase a sketchbook through their website, you can choose to pay more to have it digitized when you send it back, in which case your book will have its own url, and can be viewed online by anyone.

How to Connect

The Art Library is open for visitors Wednesdays through Sundays. You can follow the Project through their website, on Instagram, and on Facebook. See the Project's home, order, and FAQ pages for more details.

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Japanese Takumi Documentary

A real-time documentary about craft meant to be sped up by the viewer.

You might also like to explore our posts about American Craftspeople and American basket-makers.

Modern Woodblock Printing

It’s always exciting when a craft that seems stuck in time gets nudged into modernity. It reminds us that we can have fun breathing new life into processes we’ve taken for granted or relegated to history.

Woodblock printing has been around as a method to print on fabric since sometime before 220 AD, in China. Examples of using woodblocks to print on paper can be found from the 7^th century AD, and, as a technique, survived into the 19^th century before falling off in popularity.

What may first come to mind when we think about Japanese woodblock prints are landscapes and seascapes created by Katsushika Hokusai. 

Jed Henry and David Bull have teamed up to bring woodblock printing into the 21^st century. Jed, an American illustrator, and David, a British master woodblock printer, collaborated to create Ukiyo-e Heroes, featuring woodblock prints of video game characters, handmade in the Japanese woodblock tradition.

To make a woodblock print, you start with a block of wood with one flat surface, and carve away the parts of the surface that you ultimately want to be the white or negative spaces. Areas of wood left intact on the surface will be inked, and that will become the woodblock picture. To get the image you want, you need to cut away wood where you don’t want any ink.

Once your image has been carved in the wood, ink is spread evenly over the surface, and sticks to it until you transfer the ink to another surface.

If you want a multi-colored print, you need to make one wooden block per color in the print, figuring out where the color and the white (negative) areas are, and carve accordingly. Then, you’ve got to make sure that your blocks line up perfectly at each new color block printing, so that colors don’t overlap where they’re not meant to. 

Woodblock printing is a finicky endeavor, and takes years for a craftsman to become masterful at creating woodblock print images.

In the 2013 video from Creators wao, Jed gives insight into his passion project of modernizing the stories told through woodblock prints.

Once an image is decided upon, it’s up to David and his staff at his Tokyo-based collective workshop, Mokuhankan, to create a series of wooden carvings on cherry wood blocks. Each color in the final image needs to be printed on the paper one layer at a time, from individually carved blocks. Each round of adding the next color is done by hand, making it a time-consuming craft. And, since it’s layered using a fresh coat of ink at every pass, each print is unique.

You can see the step-by-step layering in a series of photos on Mokuhankan, which show the building up of the image of the print “Rickshaw Cart.” Click on the small black and white drawing in the center of the page to start the slideshow.

Below is a video of the process:

You can read more about David’s woodblock printing business and his printing process here and here. 

You might also like David Bull’s YouTube channel, and The Jed Henry's Instagram account. There are links to subscribe and to purchase prints via their Instagram bio.

For further reading, John Brownlee that goes deeper into Jed and David's woodblock printing collaboration. It’s a great 8-minute read, with a slide show of 13 early woodblocks inspired by Super Mario Kart, Metroid, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, Kirby’s Dream Land, Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter, Mega Man, Pokemon, Secret of Mana, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

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Free-to-Use Images

When you’re thinking about resources for your arts and crafts projects, the Library of Congress (LOC) might not be at the top of your list for where to go to find images.

But it should be.

You should have a look around the LOC’s online collections for inspiration, and for free-to-use downloadable images that can decorate your home, be incorporated into collages, journals and scrapbooks, or be used to create custom printed fabric and paper items. 

If you have a commercial website or a personal blog,  and use images in the public domain, you know it's sometimes time-consuming and difficult to find image banks which offer a broad range of styles. It's often difficult to find good images which haven't been over-utilized. 

The Library of Congress is a monumental depository of information, and has thousands of images available for re-use. It’s a national treasure that's available to the public, and it's getting larger and more expansive every year - adding approximately 12.000 items to the Collections daily.

 The expansiveness of the Collection is in part due to a special acquisitions program which extends beyond materials sourced and archived in the United States:

The Prints and Photographs Division alone contains "more than 15 million visual images, including the most comprehensive international collection of posters in the world, the most comprehensive visual record of the Civil War, and pioneering documentation of America's historic architecture. More than 1.2 million images are accessible on the Prints and Photographs online catalog..."

You can search through 9,491 Prints and Photographs, with a variety that includes photos of President Abraham Lincoln at Antietam, Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, a photo of Jackie Robinson, and souvenir illustrated cards from the Russian Empire as it existed in 1856.

In their World Digital Library, items are sorted by: Books, Journals, Manuscripts, Maps, Motion Pictures, Newspapers, Prints and Photographs, and Sound Recordings.

To help you navigate the massive amount of information, visit the two Subjects in Digital Collections pages, where items in the Collection are indexed into 132 categories.

To give you some perspective, here's a breakdown of the numbers of items in certain categories:

• 4,019,643 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books, and other recorded formats)
• 72,512,459 manuscripts
• 5,608,003 maps
• 17,250,956 microforms
• 1,834,690 moving images
• 8,248,463 items of sheet music
• 15,733,020 visual materials, including:
  • 14,942,941 photographs
  • 109,307 posters
  • 680,772 prints and drawings
• 3,449,194 other items (including machine-readable items)

Free-to-use images are sorted into sets on the Free to Use and Reuse Sets page. You can search through sets of WPA posters, World War 1 posters, Japanese Fine Prints, Baseball cards, and more. 

A collection of free-to-use posters from 1890s – 1960s features different illustration styles for promoting health, travel, products, liberty bonds, insurance, government programs, and entertainment. The poster collection is a collaboration with Poster House, a new museum "dedicated to presenting the impact, culture, and design of posters, both as historical documents and methods of contemporary visual communication.."

Among the books in the Classic Childrens’ Books page are: In the Court of King Arthur (illustrated by Neil O’Keeffe), Ballad of the Lost Hare by Margaret Sidney, Jack and the Beanstalk, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (illustrations by John Tenniel), Peter Rabbit (illustrated by Harrison Cady), and The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (illustrated by W.W. Denslow).

Copyright and Use

You always need to be mindful of and careful about verifying free-to-use and public domain items you come across. On the LOC's website, pages with free-to-use items feature content that is "either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use."

We've written about other sources for free-to-use and public domain images and items. You might want to read about:

600+ Free Art Books Online

Museum Collection Images

Vintage Graphics

The Craftsmanship of Making Ink 

We are surrounded by printed items in our everyday lives – in magazines, books, newspapers, product packaging, food packaging, posters, signs, and more. Our world is made more lovely, vibrant, and interesting because of the inks in these items.

Anyone who has made prints with ink - lithographs, wood blocks, letterpress, or silk screens – probably loves the processes involved in creating artworks using them. And they love the qualities of inks that best suit their needs. What better than to be able to work with color-dense ink that handles easily and consistently?

Inks vary in the depth and complexity of color, viscosity, glossiness, and the time it takes to dry.

Sometimes it’s fun to watch the process behind the product. In this case, we get a tour of ink-making from Peter Welfare, of the Printing Ink Company. He’s passionate about the crafting process of making a high quality ink, with designers and artists in mind.

Watch the video below to see the varnish and powder go through heating, crushing, and mixing to create a high gloss ink with intense color. And, see how the company uses computers for quality control.

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Getting Started With Linoleum Printing

Hand print designs for art prints, posters, cards, announcements, and more.

Below are five videos which we've curated to help you get started in linoleum block printing. The first three videos, hosted by Kati Henning for Blick Art Materials, clearly explain the step-by-step process of making a linoleum block print. The fourth video, by The Virtual Instructor, explains how to transfer a drawing to a linoleum block using carbon paper. And the fifth video, by Maarit Hänninen, shows how to transfer a drawing via an inkjet printer.

The first video below, Getting Started, covers the materials you’ll need to make a lino print, including hard and soft linoleum (mounted and unmounted), cutting tools, paper, brayer rollers, a bench plate, and ink (oil- or water- based).

The Virtual Instructor shows how to transfer a drawing onto linoleum using pencil rubbings. 

You could also simply use carbon paper: put a piece of carbon paper between the drawing and the linoleum block. Trace all of the lines of your drawing, then lift off your drawing and the carbon paper to check to make sure all the lines have been transferred to the lino. If any of the lines need to be darkened, simply trace again directly on the linoleum.

Watch the video below from Finnish printmaker Maarit Hänninen to see how to transfer an image to a linoleum block via an ink jet printer and either carpenter's wood glue or Mod Podge:

​

​Block printing is a great way to produce a series of the same image. In the video below, Kati shows how you can also create multiples of the same image but with variations in color and background choices. She also provides lots of tips for a successful print. 

Finally, the video below shows how to produce a series of multilayered linoleum prints. If you’re making a lino print with many layers using multiple lino blocks, you’ll have to create a system for lining up your paper for each printing layer, so the different layers align properly for each print "pulled."

It’s easy to lose track of negative and positive sections when you’re busy cutting. Cutting away can’t be undone. So it’s a good trick to mark the areas that you’ll be cutting away as a good visual guide of positive and negative spaces. You can simply take a pencil and use the side of the point to fill in the areas that you’re going to be cutting away.

Don't miss: Altered Book Sculptures, Museum Collection Images, and Vintage Graphics for resources and inspiration.

· All the products in this video and many others are available at Blick Art Materials and Amazon. Or, click on the items below to get started with supplies. The Brooklyn Refinery is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission - at no cost to you. (Learn more.)

Mechanized Flip Books

Artist Juan Fontanive has created a series of mechanized flip books of birds in flight.  Called Ornithology, the series of animated images are made from 18th and 19th Century natural history illustrations. Juan created collages from the illustrations and set them to flip at the right speed so that what we see is a continuous loop of birds in flight.

You can find more about Juan Fontanive on his website and on Instagram.

You might like to try your hand at making a flip book with the FlipBookit Maker Kit and the instructions found here. [The Brooklyn Refinery is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more]

Don't miss: How to Make a Pinhole Camera, Vintage Graphics, and Free Comics Course. 

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Vintage Maps

     · Don't miss: Crafting Resources, American Crafts, and Museum Collection Images.

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Su Blackwell's Fantastic Landscapes

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Brian Dettmer creates fantastical book sculptures. He uses a take-away process, using a skilled and patient editing artfulness, digging through layers of a book’s pages. He looks for text and pictures to save, and cuts away the rest.

There are at least a few aspects of books as objects that Brian works with – the spine and hard covers which act as solid building blocks, the flexible pages, and the variability of content on each page.

The books that are best suited for his work are large, old encyclopedias and dictionaries with sturdy spines and packed with illustrations and text.

Once Brian chooses a book that suits his next project, the magic begins – the aspect of his work that makes it uniquely his. His carving away at pages are his particular poetic choices - excavating for words and pictures that will be juxtaposed next to (or on top of) each other. He’s looking to create stories out of whatever book he chooses to work with, searching for meaning to find and share. He works at creating a meaningful story with literal layering in sculptural form.

Brian crafts single, stand-alone books, or connects and intertwines several books into a new shape. He has shaped books into skulls, skeletons, animal remains, carousels, and totems before doing his excavations on the texts.

"It's a completely sculptural subtractive process. So, in a way it's almost a metaphor for reading, because while I'm carving through, I don't know what I'm going to come across.

It's an excavation so I'm not adding any color or doing any drawing. I really want the actual book to become a collaborator with me."

Brian Dettmer

You can hear Brian talk about his work in the TED talk Brian Dettmer: Old Books Reborn as Intricate Art, below.

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“The Graphics Fairy is an Angel Company. You are free to use all clip art images in any of your projects created for resale or pleasure. Please do not use more than 6 of the graphic images within any one project, or within a single page of a blog or website. My images may not be used on free graphics sites (in other words if you own a “free graphics site”, do not post my images on your site to give away for free). You may sell my graphics, as collage sheets, or printables, if you desire, providing you follow the 6 image rule. A link to the Graphics Fairy is very much appreciated, when including the images on your blog or website. Thank you! © The Graphics Fairy 2007”

Please also check out her Disclaimer webpage outlining public domain and copyright issues with the reuse of images.

MORE LINKS:

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