I was having so much fun with the Gocco the other day that I didn’t want to stop with the inclusion cards, so I made some folded cards using a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge that I took a couple of years ago and converted into black and white line art.

It might go up on Etsy, but not yet. One thing I realized a few weeks ago during the list-something-every-day experiment is that you have to list frequently in every category you want to sell in, because otherwise you’re depending on someone looking at (for example) books to look at your store to buy your cards. So I took down the few gift card/tag postings that I had, because listing something priced at $3.50 multiple times at $0.20 per listing cost more than I would make from the item. I think I need a few more card styles before I start listing in a second category.

You’re probably sick of hearing about my Etsy store experiences by now, but indulge me just a little longer and join me in celebrating the week when the number of sales surpassed the number of items in stock. In fact, I’m now faced with a problem I didn’t consider when I first began selling three months ago: I’m running out of stock!

But instead of making new books, today I’ve been enjoying my newly laid out workspace and playing with my Gocco printer. I sold my old desk on Craigslist this week, and now my studio has just one desk, the giant paper cart, my comfy chaise, and a small drawer unit that I’m using as a side table for the chaise. The middle of the room is a large open area where I can spread stuff out on the floor. The paper cart has enough space to not only leave the paper cutter up there, but to have a workspace beside it, so I set up the Gocco printer there and was able to leave the computer and other works in progress on my desk. When I had two desks in here I usually just had paper stacked on the second desk, so it wasn’t a usable workspace. This is very happy-making!

I designed business cards today for my Etsy store and ordered a set from Vista Print. What I liked about Vista Print: they had an Illustrator template that I could download to ensure that the resolution, size, and printable area were all set correctly; their price, at $19.99 for 250 cards, seemed about right; and I’ve found a few people who ordered from them and were happy with the results. What I didn’t like: being forced to go through seven screens of upselling during the checkout process. No, I don’t want address labels, note cards, magazine subscriptions, pens, $25 from Google, or any of the other items they were hawking—good grief! I almost went elsewhere. But when I finally got to the last checkout page, there was a field for a Promo Code, which gave me the idea to Google for “vista print promo code” and led me to this rather old blog page which still had valid links to promotional deals on the site. So instead of $25.73 with shipping, my order came to $9.73. The moral of this story: the internet is your friend.

The other exciting thing that happened this week is that my new paper cart arrived yesterday—all 136 pounds of it. I bought the large one, so the shelves are large enough to hold 23″ by 35″ sheets of Mohawk Superfine, rolls of book cloth, full sheets of book board, weights and other tools, AND my giant Kutrimmer paper cutter on top, where it’s usable, instead of on the floor, buried under weights and other tools.

I also finished off some new Coptic-bound journals, the first of which (shown above) is now available in my Etsy store. The remainder will be going up over the next couple of weeks. I’ve now gone through almost all of the prepared sections of paper I had on hand a month ago: they’ve turned into 15 books. Wow!

Having gotten a few practice runs out of the way with the Running with Scissors journal and About the Size journals 1, 2 and 3, I was ready to commit to a hardcover version. I ended up doing this one twice; the first time the binding was perfect, but I pricked my finger during the sewing and bled on the cover. Gah! So I cut the stitching and took the pages out and made a second case.

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Last bit of the cover stock from the damaged poster. This is the Buttonhole Stitch Binding from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Bindings book. I didn’t fold the cover all the way over to the spine in this one, just made flaps like a dust jacket, and the spine is only folded double from where the cutout is made. The result is that the spine doesn’t feel as substantial to me as the others did (only two layers instead of three), and I found when I pulled the threads tight I wore grooves in the edges where the threads went over the top and bottom. But I like the way the vertical threads cross the horizontal lines in the drawing.

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Folding paper can be relaxing. We have broad window sills in our condo, about 21" deep, and sometimes I’ll work there, folding the paper into sections while listening to an audio book and watching the people and the traffic below me. I’ll get into a rhythm of picking up a large sheet of paper, matching the corners and finger-pressing the fold, and setting it aside, and then moving to the next sheet. Then I’ll crease all the folds with a bone folder and tear them (or not), restack the paper, and make the next fold on all the sheets.

Now if only I could motivate my butt to get out the PVA and make some cases.

One more journal in the Long Stitch bindings series. This is a sibling journal to About the Size Journal #1: same size, same paper, same poster, but with a variation on the spine stitching.

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Playing with some more long stitch bindings. This is the classic Long Stitch through Slotted Cover binding from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Bindings book, except that I poked four holes in the spine instead of using slots. Like the Running with Scissors journal, I used part of a damaged Jay Ryan print for the cover, and 24 lb Mohawk Superfine for the pages. The journal measures 4-1/2 inches wide by 5-3/4 inches high and has 192 pages in 8 sections.

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I’m shaking things up a bit with my bookbinding and trying some new things. I’ve been inspired by some of the work Dennis Yuen has done with exposed bindings on hardcover journals, but I haven’t done any long stitch bindings in quite a while (since summer 2006, apparently), so I’m practicing, and my first result is the Running with Scissors journal.

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I’ve been toying with the idea of posting some books on Etsy for a while now, but I never got around to it. There is actually a fair bit of work involved in photographing the items and writing up the descriptions and figuring out shipping charges and setting up Paypal with a bank account.

Lucky for me I’ve just become unemployed, and I now have time (for the time being) to do all this stuff. So, you can now visit the Bathtub Dreamer store at Etsy and purchase the Bunnies and Moiré photo album shown above, or one of my other photo albums or Coptic- or hard-bound journals, like this Spot Journal.