Making a journal

Last Saturday I got up and had an easy morning and then packed up a tote with supplies and headed to the southeast campus of Portland Community College to take a class on book binding, specifically learning to make journals. There are several reasons why I started poking around to find a way to take some type of art class, one of them being inspired by my friends Val Head and Samantha Warren, but also as a way to do something different. Something away from the screen with actual things.

I studied art in school, but have drifted away from actually creating things since I’ve been on the web. But lately, in my quest to restore some sanity to my life, I want to take dedicated time away from the web. What I’ve found has been great. Portland Community College has a great community education program full of different classes, many of them meeting only 2 or 3 times, along with full quarter classes that meeting weekly for the entire term.

I decided to try something completely new and not anywhere in my arts background and go with book binding to learn how to make a journal. The teacher is a local book binder and she was so great. Really good at explaining the whys of what we were doing as well as the how. So I sat at a desk, she started on explanations, and away we went on the road to making a journal.

Being the nerd I am, I wanted to document the process for myself so that I could remember the steps we went through to get to the finished product. So I brought our camera and took photos as we went along of the entire thing. You can see them all on Flickr, at the bottom of this post is my finished journal.

Next week I go back for the final class to make another journal to help cement in the process. This is definitely something I could keep doing on my own at home and read about to learn more, so I’m excited about it. Meanwhile this week I’ll be going to a leather store and I’ve already drooled over papers to pick out something for my next journal.