So many hobbies!

Cafepress store

I opened a new Cafepress store for my t-shirt designs:  Middle Kingdom T's.  There should be four designs but I can't tell if all four are appearing.  Their store set-up is kind of confusing.  I'll try a bit more but I'm tired and I may have to bail for the night and try again tomorrow.

Shirts and book stuff

My second bookbinding class was this weekend:  Tools and Tricks of the Bookbinding Trade.  We learned things that will make bookbinding easier and made tools that are easily portable.

 

The contraption on the right is a collapsible punching cradle for punching holes to sew a book together.  We also made a sleeve to carry the cradle when not in use.  The punching cradle I have at home is made of wood and is not something I can take with me if I need to travel for whatever reason.  On the far left, I made a brush rest out of polymer clay - very handy when you have a gluey brush and don't want glue all over your work surface.  From the middle top down:  a soft weight, two polymer clay punches, a solid weight and lastly, a bamboo paper knife.  With the exception of the bamboo paper knife, I'll use all of these tools.  I'd use the bamboo knife if I could get it sharp enough but my sanding just seemed to dull it.  I've got a metal paper knife so I'm not very motivated to spend more time sanding.

 

We put together this little 3-section book during the course of the two days.  The last two sections are blank but the first section holds all of the nice tips and tricks that the instructor had come up with since she started bookbinding.  She taught us four ways to miter corners on paper covers.  I know the paper is dark, but I think you can still see how the corners in the picture are mitered.  The corners were lots of fun.  Apparently, I'm good at what we were learning because I was always the first one done.  It was kind of nice.

Saturday night I created some t-shirt designs to sell on Cafepress.  They're not up yet - I'll do it tomorrow - but I've ordered shirts for myself.  I've got ideas for a couple more but they're still in the idea stage.  Here's the first one:

 

And the second one:

 

These have meaning for me and I hope they'll have meaning for others.