We Made it Through The Rain

We had water damage upstairs, but hey, we wanted to remove the carpet (previous owner had yippy dogs with incontinence) and repaint anyhow, and I'd been putting it off. Water damage downstairs, too, and I have a feeling it'll need a bigger repair there... oh, well. But we made it through, and yesterday was our first day with power! Which is great! I'll get back to this once I've finished regrouping (bought milk! bought pumpkins! had lamb stew, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies, and pumpkin beer -- it's fall!) and have gotten the camera back out.

Thanks for all your good wishes!

The Storm

I just posted this over at A Little Hut, but may as well put it here too:

We're in Montrose. Seems like this time people are actually paying attention to the instructions, and evacuating only when they're supposed to (either 1) you're in an area in the storm surge, 2) you're in an unsafe structure like a mobile home, or 3) you're physically fragile and might not be able to survive a power outage or a broken window). Should be entertaining overall; I've been through a few, and they weren't so bad -- mainly b/c my house is high up, and my old Ford seems perfectly capable of taking on a few inches of water and then having nothing to show for it but a bad smell. If your house is poorly located, it might be a bit more unpleasant, though. Take care and stay dry and undamaged!

First limp leather attempt

This was something I made a month or two ago (along with several small casebound leather books, which worked quite well at that small scale and made me very happy indeed). There were so many problems with it. To begin with, my needle was too big, I believe (I now have smaller needles), and the holes I had made for chain stitch at the ends of the signatures ended up turning into slits (and, in case you didn't realize it, a chain stitch doesn't hang on to a slit very well). That, coupled with my lack of knowledge of exactly what order to do things in, ended up in my getting very lost on the inside and the whole bottom right corner of the text block spine not being attached to the cover at all:

(You can also see that I didn't get the signatures lined up well with each other either -- something went wrong when punching the holes.)

The way the spine finally ended up turning out was even wonkier than the rest:



But at least it worked as a book -- it's got text from Project Gutenberg and is not structurally difficult at all to read. So, not a complete failure after all.

Etsy notes

I have a secret admirer! That's much more entertaining than I thought it would be. And I've learned that, while it's fun to "heart" something you're debating buying, just like leaving it on your wish list somewhere else, it doesn't save you from the disappointment when someone else buys it (had been looking at Rhonda's leather scraps, as they'd have been fun for an edition binding of something small... perhaps a collection of Alcott/Montgomery/Wiggin short stories (I like late-Victorian uplifting stories for young ladies), or some such... but dawdled too long).

And I've made more earrings (they get better with time), as well as another lovely little coptic (well, twice the size of the silver-purple paisley one, but still small), and I'm learning to rejoice in so many glorious colors. Photos when I get around to it!

Silvery-purple-paisley coptic minibook

This is such fun paper -- the purple is very deep and rich and flimsy-feeling, and the silver's all shiny and lovely and happy. This is the first time it occurred to me to use my colored crochet thread, and I'm very pleased with the way it accentuates the spine.

Not a book I made

I swear, the book in the post below is not the same one as the book on the right in the photo here: http://etsybooks.blogspot.com/2008/09/book-swap-4-travel-preview.html

Same paper, though. Funny how we had the same idea!

It's hard to post lovely with-photo posts when you have to set up the camera to do it ... I have a new respect for all of you.