Author name: Karla Nathan

For the last few years, my sisses and I have been meeting in Siesta Key, FL each fall for beach time, craft time, and lots of laughter filled, silliness time.

(front of Bobbie's book)

I pack my portable photo printer, a bag of supplies and three hand made books to work in, we sit at the huge picture window over looking the Gulf, and create all week long. This year's books are embellished with cameos of 3 sisters, and are done in beachy scrapbook paper with vintage elements.

I've been swamped with getting my last kits for A Snowbird's Song finished before going out of town and decided to use a journal I'd made a while back for my own book,  adding a matching cameo to the cover.

But I wanted to hand make special books for my sisters, it is a tradition.

After playing hookie from work for a morning to estate sale with Beth, we stopped at Michaels to get some scrapbook paper and she invited me to come into her craft room and borrow her book binder to quickly stick the papers together and  get one more job marked off my list of to-dos.

GREAT IDEA!

 

Or so I thought….

 

I whipped up a couple sets of covers to decorate later, cut and folded all of the interior pages and was ready to bind.  

Then, we couldn't remember how to use the binder.

(front of Sissy's book)

We smashed the coils too tight, and belatedly thought maybe we should look up directions.

Yep, got it figured out, tried again.

This time, the coils were too small and the pages wouldn't turn.

Oops, no larger coils left to use.

Next plan- I cut the holes made by the binding machine off the edges of one of the sets of pages to change the way it was put together from coil bound into one made with 2 rings.

So, I punched all new holes with the Crop-o-dile, but did it without a template, thinking, "Heck I SELL tutorials on how to make books, I don't need to follow directions, I can do this on my own. I MAKE MY OWN DIRECTIONS."

Kind of how Walter White said,  "I am the One Who Knocks n the door" right before his whole drug empire fell apart and he lost everything.

You can probably guess, I punched those holes badly.

The rings didn't fit through the wildly spaced holes, and when Beth held it up to look at, we both lost it.  Our laughing was more out of control than those goofy looking holes I'd punched.

That could be fixed, right? I was just going to cut the left margin off past the misplaced holes and repunch them correctly.

Oh my! Some of those holes were beyond wildly done, to the point of looking like a drunk did them. And  no, there was not any wine at craft day. Just my own whining about how crappy of a job I'd done.  

Once I'd trimmed off enough of a couple of pages, I realized that they were now too small to hold a 4×6 photo.  

More rolling on the floor laughing, came at that point. Then, more whining.

So, next plan? I covered the holes in glued on coordinating strips of paper, and repunched the holes using a template as I should have done in the first place. And as Beth mentioned many times that I was crazy not to do.

(butterfly paper for our mom who loved butterflies, and ice cream paper in recognition of how much of the frosty stuff we snack on while we are in Florida each fall)

That worked just fine.  

But was too much to go through for both books, so I decided to make use of the holes punched by the binder on the second book.

The binder had them perfectly measured and even for me already, I just didn't have a coil to put through them.  But a blunt needle and some twine worked just as well and was pretty quick.

(back of Bobbie's book, her last name is Valentine and I always make something with hearts for her)

If you tie enough ribbons and charms to the albums, no one sees the binding anyway, right??