Last Christmas, lovely Jane gave me a desk calendar where each month was a hand-printed card by a different Houston artist. I liked some of them so much that they got stuck up on my bulletin board for several months after the month on the card! So at the end of the year I couldn’t bear to toss them all, and I came up with this idea to give them a new life.

From each of the cards I liked, I cut a 2-1/4″ by 3-1/2″ rectangle from the artwork and rounded the corners. The ties are linen thread leftovers from all the bookbinding I did last year. (The card above is January: it’s a letterpress piece, and the tracks in the snow are recessed in the paper – beautiful!)

I got multiple gift cards from some of the months, like December, where the design allowed for two cuts.

(I also got two copies of December and a couple of other months, so I got to make two sets!)

I think the card above is March (march hare?) – it reminds me of the creepy bunny in Donnie Darko…

July? (Edmond thought this was Jabba the Hutt, but I think it’s just a toad.)

I’ll have to save this one for next time I have a gift for my sister-in-law, April.

Boo! I think this one was letterpress too. I love letterpress.

All year long when I’m making books I put the leftover bits and pieces of paper in a bin, and at the end of the year I sort it all into scrap paper packets. Most of the pieces are Japanese Chiyogami or Yuzen papers; most of the remainder are papers from India or the US; and a few are cardstock.

I have six of these packets to give away this month. The papers range in size from narrow strips to about 5″ by 7″, and as you can see in the picture there’s a nice assortment of different papers in each. I wrote a post a while back about things I’ve done with similar scraps, and here are a few more things you could do with them:

• Marble magnets
• Jewelry using pendant trays or Scrabble tiles or dominoes or glass tiles or microscope slides (you can easily find small quantities of glass tiles, Scrabble tiles, bails, chains, cords, etc. on Etsy—search in Supplies)
• Cover the lid of an Altoids tin and make a travel candle—or cover tins for lip balm or bath salts or jewelry or tea (again, try Etsy for tins)
• Make stickers (if you have a Xyron machine)
• Make place cards
• Make matchboxes (here’s some beautiful inspiration)
• Turn a pad of small sticky notes into a book
• Make a small version of this ornament accordion book
• Make a Washi fan card or a kimono card
• Make a string of pennants

So now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, leave a comment by midnight PST on November 30th and tell me what you could do with a packet of pretty papers. I’ll draw up to six winners at random on December 1st and contact them by email, and then mail out the booty later in the week. (Obviously you’ll have to trust me with your mailing address if you win, but I promise I’m not creepy or anything and I won’t sell it to anybody.)

UPDATE: Entries are now closed, and the winner is Anne! Thanks, Anne, for entering. I’ll be sending your paper packet off to you tomorrow!

This is the last of the small journals. I really like the size of these (4-5/8″ wide by 5-7/8″ ), they have a nice weight and feel good in the hand.

Another paper I wouldn’t normally have picked, but I’m trying to expand my horizons a bit.

I would never have picked out this paper, except that Jane chose the green colorway for me to make her wedding guest book, and now I can’t get enough of it.

Monkey paper!

Orange endsheets add to the fun!

And a close up of the endbands. I would have gone for orange here too, except that when I bought my spools of silk thread I only bought a half-dozen colors that I thought I’d use, and oddly enough orange wasn’t among them. So I went for the safe colors here.

I’ve been slowly working through all the paper and boards I’ve prepped over the last few months, and the stack of completed Coptics and accordion photo albums has grown and grown. But I also made some case-bound journals that I was pretty happy with, in two sizes, and I thought I’d post pics of those, because I don’t do them often and because I hand-sewed the endbands on them and I’m kind of proud of myself.

I did two sizes, and this is one of the smaller ones at 4-5/8″ wide by 5-7/8″ high, with 192 pages of soft white 24lb Mohawk Superfine paper (8 sections of 6 folios, sewn onto tapes).

Here’s a close-up of the headband: it’s a simple beaded headband from Headbands : How to Work Them by Jane Greenfield and Jenny Hille. I took a class at the San Francisco Center for the Book a few months ago where they taught the same method, but I’d forgotten how to do it by the time I actually got around to sewing one, so I was happy to have this book. The drawings are pretty clear.

Still playing with the long stitch book structure. This one is similar to the flapped closure I did in May, but with a ribbon tie instead of the button-and-string closure.

I can’t remember where I bought this ribbon, but I’ve wanted to do something like this with it for a while. It’s a matte cotton ribbon with a loose weave, so it has a bit of a rough texture to it.

I like the black cotton paired with the very smooth, blue-gray card stock. But I think I like the button tie closure more: maybe because the closure doesn’t extrude beyond the edges of the book on the button tie closure, or because the closure thread on that version echoes the thread used in the spine sewing.

I like simple things.

I was so happy with II that I decided to turn it into a set.

I uses the same handmade Lokta bark paper from Nepal as II. Aside from the reversal of colors, and the difference in the cut-out, it is constructed in the same way.

The sewing is, again, the Long Stitch Through Slotted Wrapper Cover, from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Binding I: Books Without Paste or Glue. It’s a slightly wonky sewing, what with the offset and the leaning threads at the top and bottom, and often I like a little more symmetry but here I find its lack rather suits the handmade feel.

I have a number of colors of the Lokta paper. I think it would be neat to make a whole set of these, with a slip case to hold them all, so that the different colored spines would be showing with the stitching. Though I’m not sure I’m interested enough by the idea to venture into box making (I’ve made one box and it turned out okay, but it doesn’t excite me.)

I’ve done a fair bit in the studio recently, but almost all of it is prep work for books yet to be finished: the boards are cut and the sections laid out, punched and/or sewn onto tapes, all in preparation for a bunch of books-to-be, but there is not much interesting to show you. I like to do this sometimes, get all the production work out of the way, or enjoy the meditative repetition of tearing down paper sheets or sewing sections onto linen tapes. But then sometimes I want something to be done.

The cover for II is handmade Lokta bark paper from Nepal, which I purchased from Hollander’s. It’s made from two pieces: the off-white piece is folded over the red one, so the cover is three layers thick and the cut-outs show the red underneath. The covers and pages are all secured in place by the sewing, so this is a true non-adhesive book.

The sewing is from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Binding I: Books Without Paste or Glue.

l like the simplicity of this little book (only 4-1/2″ wide by 5-3/4″ high by 1/4″ thick). The texture of the paper makes it pleasurable to hold and, along with the contrast of the stitching and the strong graphic cut-outs, interesting to look at. The cover is delicate (this is not a book to be tossed in a bag) but still solid enough to provide structure. I often forget about these paper-covered books, but I come back to them again and again. I think there are 10 more of them in my near future.