 How are you today? This is another video for my year 2017. This month is June and the prompt is growth. So today we're going to explore the idea of taking your again of taking your art with you wherever you may be going and maybe you're going on a vacation, maybe you're going away for the weekend, maybe you're having a special event. Why not create a special little glue book rather than dragging one of your journals you're already working on with you which you can still do if you want but make a little small glue book or journal to use just on the trip. Now a glue book for those that don't know it's just a book that you really just do collage in. These are two that I've done recently. This one was done as part of a collab with Mike Deakin and they are a lot of fun. Here's another one that I did. They are both kind of a little bit bigger than the one I'm actually thinking about having us do today and really you're just gluing bits and pieces and copies of some of my old artwork and different quotes I've cut out and just all kinds of fun little bits and pieces. Now what if you had one of these that was blank and all the bits and pieces and things that you glued in here were from things you found while you were on vacation. How fun would that be? So here I have a piece of card stock and it's painted on one side just it's basically just a wipe off page that I pulled out of my stash that I had painted on before and a couple of pieces of mixed media paper. I need to grab a needle and thread in my paper trimmer and I'll be right back. Now you're going to need something to poke holes with. This is a Tim Holtz pokey tool retractable. You could use an ice pick or an awl. A long large eyed needle. Some thread or twine. A piece of paper, thicker paper for the cover and then some paper for the insides. I'm going to just use two sheets of paper. I really don't want my book to be too big. I don't want to spend the whole day time on vacation working in my journal and ignoring the vacation. I just want it to be something that I can do a little bit of in the morning while I'm having my coffee. Everybody else is still sleeping. I tend to kind of get up a little early. I need to sip water, sorry. So I don't want too many pages in it. I want it to be finished by the time I come home or shortly thereafter. So okay these are just Canson XL mixed media paper from a pad. I'm going to trim them to about the same size as the cover. I'm not going to measure anything. You can of course if you want to. I'm not going to. So you have everything about the same size. You're also going to need a bone folder. Well you could use the handle of your scissors. I do have a bone folder though. So now you want to fold everything in half and I like this size because it's not too small. My pages are going to be decent sized to be able to work on and not too teeny weeny. Too big or too small make it harder to work on. Too big makes it difficult to get it done in the time allotted even if there's only a couple pages. And too small makes it too hard to put any interesting work on there because the pages are too small. This I think will be a good size. I'm going to measure it for you in just a minute. So I'm going to nestle. I've got my cover. One page, two pages just like that. They measure about six and three quarters by four and a quarter. Now you'll see you'll notice here at the edge that the interior pages are sticking out a little bit. We're going to do something about that but first we're going to sew everything together. So I'm going to hold them all together tightly at the fold. I'm going to take my sharp pokey tool. You could measure this. Okay I'm not going to but you could measure it and I do probably recommend for most of you that you do. I'm going to just eyeball it and write it about the center right through the fold of all three sheets. I'm going to poke a hole and then halfway between that hole in the outer edge another hole and the same on the other side. Again you could measure this if you want to. I'm not going to. I have some really pretty purple thread here that I'm actually going to double thread it through our needle. That's probably the hardest part of the whole project because I don't have my glasses on. I need some beeswax. Ha I got it. No I didn't. I thought I did. Okay I'm going to thread the needle. I'll be right back. Okay got it. I had to get the glasses out. All right I'm going normally I start from the inside and I hide the knot but I actually think I want to put the knot on the outside this time so I'm going to start from the outside center hole and I'm going to leave a couple inches like that. Then I'm going to go up to this other hole and then down to this other hole. The trick of course is not to pull that little tail end of the thread out when you're doing this. So you can have something like that. Then we're going to go back into the center hole that we started in and ideally come out the opposite side of this beginning tail. So when we end it we have one here and one here. That's what you want. I'll take the needle off now. I'm actually going to adjust it a little bit so my two ends are a little bit closer in length as each other. Pull it firm but not too tight. This is paper after all people and I'm going to tighten a knot. Now I would normally trim these really small but one of the fun things that might be with this little mini glue book to do is to leave them long and then as you're going maybe you pick up a little charm or some kind of little found object that you can tie on these as part of your journey. I think that would be fun. I am going to put a little bit of white glue on the knot as soon as I find it. So this is just Elmer's glue. That'll just help prevent the knot from coming out. I'll keep it all tied shut. It won't come unravelled later. Okay and now we're going to fix that edge that's all wonky where the inside pages are sticking out. They might not bother you so maybe you won't want to do anything about it and normally you would have to get out a ruler and a box cutter to do this because your book would be too thick. This should be okay because this doesn't have that much paper in it. I will probably have to do this and pull some stuff out. I'm just going to hold my book down very firmly so it doesn't move. Do that again carefully so that by the time I'm done when I close it everything is the same. You could of course round the edges. You could put something on the front that says something about your trip or your vacation but and this kind of thing would very easily when it was done fit inside the signature for that month or inside my traveler's notebook journal. So I love this idea and it's only got those two sheets of paper in it for inside pages and you can use both sides. It's just enough to document a trip on. So think about doing this. Maybe think about making a couple of extras and racking them to some of your fellow group members over in my year 2017. How fun would that be? And yeah above all have a great day. Do something fun, do something challenging, grow, learn, explore and play and join us over in my year 2017 if you're not already. All right that's it everybody for today and I will see you all later. Don't forget to go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys!