 Hey guys, how are you today? Okay, if you've seen my August favorites video, you know that my newest favorite art supply or gadget is my Arc Punch and the whole disc bound journaling planner system. I am in love with it. It's so easy, that's probably why I'm in love with it. I made these two little books right away with it. This one first. This one is full of my most often used planner stickers and it measures, oh, let's do this way. Seven and a half by four and a half. I made the cover, back and front covers, out of this chopping mat set from the Dollar Tree. It comes in a pack of two. They cut really easily with a standard paper cutter or craft cutter and they punch fabulously with the Arc Punch, like without a problem. They're this like frosted color. I cut an inside front and back cover out of some scrapbooking cardstock I had. This is from what Webster's page is. I think the paper pack is called Nest maybe. And then I cut some two and a half inch wide strips that were the height of the book, out of just white cardstock. And I used some tape runner to attach my most often used planner stickers to the front and back of each one of those strips. And now I have an easy little sticker journal that I can just flip through really easily when I'm working in one of my journals or my planner to just pull off a sticker. And as you can see, I have this thing for Korean planner stickers and Hida stickers. But they're really easy to get to and flip through, much easier than I still have my large sticker storage binder and that's great for the bulk of my stickers. But when I just specifically want a planner sticker, which is more often than not, it's really a pain to dig out the whole big binder just to get a planner sticker. This way I can just have them in here. And when one of these strips is all used up, I can just pull the whole thing out very easily and cut a new strip and put it in or pull the stickers off and glue something else to that. So I love that. I do have this rubber band on here to just keep it all together. It's a little bit fat. I made this one, which is even fatter. These are the larger rings. These are the smaller ones. I have a sticky note addiction and those of you who've been watching my channel for a while know this. And as a team lead for American Greetings, I was at the sticky note queen. I think I drove the team crazy with the sticky notes. But anyway, I love a good sticky note and I love putting them in my planners and my journals. And I wanted to take my collection of most favorite sticky notes and put them in a similar kind of book to the planner stickers. Only in this case, I made pockets and for the pockets, I used retail packaging. So I used to be in a gift shop where I sold arts and crafts and things and I actually worked as a cashier there. And what I've done is I've taken these clear bags which are from clearbags.com. And this is B65. These are four and five sixteenths by six and nine sixteenths. And I put a piece of white card stock in them and then I chopped the top of the bag off because it has a self-adhesive flap and I don't need that. And I basically just used that to create these pages with pockets on each side that I can slip my sticky notes into and I can easily reach in, pull it out, stick one in my planner and then put it back. I love it. Because they're sticky notes and they're bulky, they got really fat really quick. So especially for this one, I've just taken a Smashbook rubber band and just use that to keep it closed. So I really love this idea so much that I decided I wanted to do one more. I really want to take my watercolor sample booklet which I made quite a while ago and I wanna create it in something like this, recreate it in something like this that I can just take the sheet out, watercolor with it, stick it back in here. I love that idea. So we're gonna take it apart. So we're gonna take, this is the Daniel Smith information so we're gonna pull that out and each one of these out. No, the Daniel Smith has a color dot sample chart you can buy. They come on eight and a half by 11 sheets which is what these are from. And I cut them down to fit in this book. And you get a little sample dot of each one of their 238 colors, which is fabulous. And that way you can try out colors before you buy a whole tube. And I've taken a little piece of acetate and duct taped it to the front of each one of these little cards after I cut it down so that I could be flipping through the book and if I've gotten the little dot wet I don't have to worry about it smearing everywhere because the acetate will protect it. Which I think I'm gonna leave on there but we'll see in a minute. Let's get this apart first. Quar watercolors which are made by Golden also have some sample sheets and I have some of those in here and those determine the size of this book. But now you might be cutting those down now. Let's, we'll find out. All right, first let's get all these out. There is a video on me putting this together the first time on my YouTube channel. I'll try to find it and link it in the description below but if I forget, somebody remind me. It has a piece of paper in here so let's take the paper out. Now this one had a piece of like parchment paper that I just taped this way. So I'll probably leave that. Wow, that was in there really tightly. That was really tight in there. I don't know if I'm gonna keep these pieces of paper in here but we'll keep them together for the moment. Aren't these colors pretty? All right, so we're gonna set that aside. We don't need that. All right, so yet again, the Quar samples I think are gonna determine the overall size. Let's see. I could cut this down a bit but the way they have the dots arranged I can't cut it down too much and I'm gonna need something to an edge to punch on it. So I do think it's going to determine the size. So what size is this? This is five by five. Alrighty, so we're gonna need a front and back cover. So and I'm gonna want a couple of divider tabs. So this is a 12 by 12 piece of cardstock. I cut now into five by five squares. Hopefully, I think I'll need like four five by five squares. So I'm gonna leave one long. I'll show you why in a minute. What do I wanna do? All right, so I'm gonna leave this one long for a second and we're gonna make a tab on a couple of these using the envelope punch board. And for the first one, I'm gonna just line it up with the center of the punch on one end. And then I'm going to go down to about the two inch mark. I'm gonna line up this edge with the two inch mark and punch again. Then with the second one, I'm gonna start at two and I'm gonna go down and I'm gonna take, go back to the paper cutter and I'm gonna line up the bottom of these divots with the groove in the cut paper cutter and I'm gonna cut up to the tab and then I'm gonna skip over to the other end and cut up to, and then you have a tabbed page. So let's do the other one. And then let's cut these both at five inches, lining up our tabs now with the five inch mark. Okay, I don't know why I put the paper cutter away because we need that. I do wanna trim these a little bit. I'm gonna pull the parchment paper off carefully. I'm going to cut this at the fold to start with and then I wanna cut half an inch or so off the one inch. Yeah, that'll work. Okay, so let's do that to all of them. Oh, and then we can probably reattach this after I trim it. Give the little piece of parchment a trim. If you've done this and your tape is not sticky anymore, you can put a new piece of tape. Mine is still sticky. I think it's gonna be fine. Probably it's still sticky because this outer covering of this paper is glossy. Oops. And I'm placing it away from this edge because this is where we're gonna punch for the disks. Now this disk binding system was intended for planners and that sort of thing, but think outside the box. Why couldn't you use it for an art journal and do your loose pages? Do your pages loose and then punch them to put into a master journal with your arc punch. That would be really easy way to bind them rather than stitching or anything like that. I think it's a fabulous idea. It's very easy. As you all know, I'm the lazy crafter so I really prefer something that's easy. There's nothing like a stitched journal. Don't get me wrong. I'm not gonna stop making hand stitched journals, but this is really, really easy. Now I do think I'm gonna stick, I think I'm gonna punch this piece of card watercolor paper that came with the core samples and like have it this way with the right samples, okay? So that all works. Now we want to take our two divider tabs and I wanna label them. One of course is for the core and then one is for the Daniel Smith colors. Get to the bottom here somewhere and I wanna get that little card I pulled out in the beginning, this one. And I wanna pull all of this color fastness coding information and granulation information off of here if I can or cut it off if I can't. And I wanna put it on the tab so it's gonna be for the Daniel Smith watercolors. Now we're gonna get out some glue, need some glue. These are really sticky because the tape that's on here is still sticky. I'm gonna just use my Elmer's Extreme quick drying school glue. I'll first put the name in case you didn't get a clue that they were watercolors. We'll put extra fine watercolor on there. 238 color chart. You can order the Daniel Smith color chart from the Daniel Smith website. You might be able to get it at your local art supply store also if they carry Daniel Smith paints. The core sample cards you can get from art supply stores that carry core paints or I know that I actually wrote to Golden via the core watercolor website and they sent me some. So whatever is more convenient for you all. And this kind of sample dot sheet is a great way too to carry watercolors with you. And if you have like peerless watercolors, you could make a book that includes whatever dot sample dots you have and some peerless too and do the same thing, figure out what size will work for you. All right, we're gonna label both of these. I'm gonna print some labels for the front cover also. Helps if I spell the words right. You of course don't have to use a labeler. If you have, if you want to, you can just write it by hand. I have a labeler, so why not use it my writing? I'm not a big fan of my handwriting. Okay, now no matter what kind of book you're doing, whether it's a sticker book or it's a watercolor sample book, the basic steps are the same. Figure out what size you want the book to be, cut your pages, get it everything ready and then the easy part, binding it together is the easy part. And this is a brother P-touch labeler before somebody asks. I've had it for a long time. All right, a little piece of pieces away. Now we've got our sections and our front and back cover. Now the next thing we need to cut before we start punching is I wanna put some clear plastic protection on the cover. I don't think this piece is good enough. I love this stuff so much. I save all of the pieces until I know for sure I can't use them. So we're going to two five inch squares, hopefully. So that's what I mean. I cut it with the same paper cutter that I cut my paper with. Now it might dull the blade a lot quicker than the paper would. So I would definitely maybe even designate one blade that's just for cutting the paper stuff with. That's not a bad idea. Okay, so now we're ready to do some punching and I'm going to unlock my art punch and turn it the other way so I can see what I'm doing. So I'm going to use one of the plastic sheets to start and I'm going to center it with about the same amount of space on the top and the bottom. Try to, I should say, try to center these little things that are going to punch the holes where the discs go. I'm going to try to center them on the edge of the page and when I get it centered, I'm going to push this guide up that's right by my finger so that it sits right there and then I'm going to punch and then it does that. I don't know if can you see that? Let me see, wait, do you even see that? So once I have the guide set, I can go ahead and I can just put all my pages in and sit them on the guide and push them all the way in and it's going to punch them all the exact same. Now on these, these have already been pre-cut so I'm thinking that we need to do something like what I did with the stickers. So let's hang on to those for just a second. Let me think about it while I punch all the core ones because if I punch them the way they are, it might punch off something that I don't want it to. Oh, I think that we're going to revisit these. How many of these do I have? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, 14, 15, 16 of them. If we use up the scraps, if we use up the scraps too, how big is this? This is this. So basically I'm just going to make some binding strips and this is not enough but I'm just using up the scraps of paper I had in front of me to see if it's going to work. And I'm going to take one of my binding strips now and I'm going to slide it in here and push it up against the guide. Yeah, and then I can tape this to here and stick it in the book. That will work. I need a whole heck of a lot of them. They're about one and a quarter inch, one and a half inch wide. They don't have to all be the same width. Really skinny. Let's see if I can get it in there. We do want them wide enough that they keep the guide that skinny one was maybe too skinny. We'll see if it's going to work. So now we're going to need tape, tape or staples. Actually I could do staples. Staples would be better. Let's do staples. I don't think the glue is going to stick to the duct tape and I don't think the tape will either. So what I'm thinking is if I take my strips and I staple them to the card, not to the acetate that's on here but to the card stock and at the bottom. This is the Tim Holtz tiny attacher. Now my strips are the same height as the book but my little cards, the paint swatches are actually on aren't all. So some of them are going to be shorter than others. That one's not going to work. That one I didn't punch very well. Let's see if I can punch it again. I have it stuffed all the way in there. I don't think. Is that part that I've mispunched is not going to show anyway. So we don't have to throw that away. Just try not to get your staple on the paint dot because I don't know that that's going to be a good idea. I do think I'm going to have to dig out some more paper. You could use the scraps from your cutting mat but this kind of project whether you're doing a paint swatch, a little booklet and you're doing this or you're doing the sticker booklet. I did the little tabs the same way. I just cut them for the sticker booklet a little wider and I just used scrapped card stock. I didn't even use like watercolor paper. I just used office supply card stock on the sticker book. Okay, let me get some more card stock and I'll be right back. Okay, so I cut a few more pieces of paper. I'm still not sure I have enough but I wanted to come back on camera and one of the things I like about the Arc Punches is it's really heavy duty and like I can put three sheets of card stock in here and put them all in here at the same time, slide them all the way in and it punches them with no problem. Just like it punches the plastic of the cutting mat with no problem. Not all of the disc punches are created equally and this one has really good reviews for really being able to punch through lots of materials without a problem. So I'm gonna keep stapling and I'll be right back. Okay, when you go to store your punch, you can depress the handle and then slide it to the lock side and it compacts it so that it's easier to store. There is a little tray here that holds all the little punches that you can pull out so it's not real messy. So now that we have all our pages punched and created and again, I've made a really fat book again. That's okay. We're gonna put the large rings in here, I think. These are one and a half inch rings and you just pop them in to the little punched out sections. It's so much easier to do, I have to tell you, than I have a zutter and I like my zutter bind at all but this is so much easier, I have to tell you. And it's easier to change the pages out too and if you decide you wanna move something around, you don't have to unbind the journal and rebind it in order to change pages or add something later. It's very versatile that way and I love that about it. So you just keep going like this and putting them all on the rings till you've got them all on here. Now when I did the sticker one, I put it together first, then I went back and put the stickers on the little strips. Either way you do it, there's no wrong way. I really like the idea of doing an art journal in one of these because you can just, like I said, you can do it loose and then just add it to your book. You're only limited by the size of the rings. That's the only thing. Now, the rings do cross over from like to different systems. Their rings are all, they're slightly different but they're basically the same. They're the same enough to work no matter what punch you have. So whether you have arc rings or happy planner rings they will work. They just don't come in lots of sizes. So like if you wanna make a big giant fat journal that's not gonna work, you're gonna have to do it like in a couple pieces or I should say a couple parts. Let's see if we can get this all together. It's getting fat. I knew that was gonna happen. It's gonna be like my post-it notebook. You could of course do one for, you know, if you have watercolor samples like this or something like this, you could do one for each brand. As I was going through the samples I realized how many metallic watercolors Daniel Smith has. I'd forgotten that. And I was thinking about adding some proper artist metallics to my collection of paints. I do have twinkling H2O's but I was thinking about adding some proper artist quality paints. I might take a second look at the Daniel Smith ones. So there you go, look at that. So I'm gonna just take the extra rings I'm putting in my box. Each one of these packs comes with 12 expansion rings. And these are, the ARC ones only come in certain colors. The happy planners come in more colors plus they have this cute heart in the middle. They only have nine pieces and they're a little more expensive than the ARC rings which have 12. They don't come in as many colors but they're cheaper. So here we go. Now we have a watercolor sample book and I've got all of my Daniel Smith samples. Oops, I missed one. Let's see, look at all of these. Oh, that's another one. Look at all of these metallics that I forgot they had so many fabulous metallic paints. So I'm glad I did this because I may have to go back through this and take a look at some of these. And then we have our Quar paints. So fabulous. So think about whatever binding system you have. Think about creating some little booklets for yourself with your most favorite tools or supplies that you wanna be able to access all the time like your planner stickers or sticky notes or in this case, watercolor samples. And this is a cute little small book. Like I said, you could also do something like this if you have peerless and you could even combine like Quar or Daniel Smith samples and peerless all in the same book. And then this would be cute to like take with you traveling. All right, that's it for today, everybody. I hope it gave you some ideas of what you can do. 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.