 okay that took me like five minutes to figure out where I put it away all right I can still say good morning because it's 11 47 a.m. Wednesday January 13th I edited a couple of videos that I filmed yesterday for my two one for each Facebook group they're loading to YouTube unlisted right now and the links will be shared on Friday in the two groups if you want to see those videos and you want the links go join the the links are down below in in my link tree also in my link tree list list of links which is down below go check it out I have an email newsletter I've got an Etsy store I've got patreon all the things for the things in fact for patreon we have Friday zooms they do get recorded for the people who can come and then those videos are also unlisted so yeah today I am fixing my moleskin in one of the videos I showed this all of my journals end up looking like this but the moleskins tend to start breaking at the at the spine at the kind of right right in here so I'm going to actually cut the cover off I'm going to preserve the cover for the most part I'm going to just make the spine bigger and then tape it yeah tape it back on glue it back on I want to preserve the elastic and everything so I haven't really done this before but when documented life class was popular there's a lot of YouTubers who showed how to do this sorry I'm chatting with my friend Mike Deegan there's a lot of YouTubers who showed how to do this so I would say just do some searching on YouTube but I am going to show you kind of a little bit of how to do this right now and let's get that pointed down to the table I'll be right back okay the first thing you want to do is carefully cut the spine from the the book lock the pages which I've already done on the front I'm going to show you how to do that from the back now one thing I might not preserve is the pocket because I really don't use it for anything so I might take the pocket off I'm going to leave the first page and the last page attached because I'm going to use that to reattach the cover but I want to just cut through um hold on okay I want to just cut through where the back cover meets this page this little like right here so we're going to just very carefully put the reading glasses on so I can see what I'm doing because that's helpful and just very carefully pull everything apart keep your fingers out of the way once you get it started you should be able to run the exacto knife up against the old spine and cut the cover off without cutting any of the signatures there we go in the in the book like that so now I've got a loose book block which we're going to actually reinforce a little bit with some tape because this I I did a page right here in the very beginning and can you see it's a little holy so we're going to fix that first we're going to make the spine on this bigger and again I do think we're going to take this this pocket off because I don't okay okay so now I also want to preserve the bookmark I like the bookmark um but the spine is only like a quarter of an inch and it really needs to be at least an inch and a half because it's really just going to be way too small so how to do this how to do this so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this and leave the bookmark attached towards one side or the other and then just increase the spine accordingly so I think I'm going to cut up the back cover and separate things and if you're doing something like this and you're hoping hope I'm not making a big mistake that's probably pretty normal okay so now no no no we need to add like at least an inch at least that much so what I want to do is I want to add a piece of chipboard I think um to this to make the spine so let me go get a piece I'll be right back right so the first thing I want to do is measure how big how long this is so line up the top of my cover with the top of the chipboard and cut this my quilting ruler which these quilting rulers if you're using if you're buying new tools for your art room and you don't have one of these these come in infinitely handy in the art room whether you're a sewer or not you can get them at Joanne's and Michael's use a coupon I've had this I have a few of these and I've had them a really long time now let's make sure it's the right size for our spine we're going to leave about a 16th of an inch gap or so between the spine and the covers we are going to cover it with bookbinding tape which is really really sticky this one here hopefully kind of straight we'll put this one over here I'm going to fold this up my tape is only so wide and it's probably not wide enough for this so we're going to do two things we're going to put more tape black tape on the outside but I'm also going to cover this inside with I have white tape towards the front might put like a little charm or something at the end at some point now we have to do work on this I said with this this first page is got some holes and actually when I just FYI when I made the cover so we have this because I might I might want to put something here so we're going to glue the back to where the pocket was and we're going to glue the front to this page so but I think that will be fine okay so but first we have to like do something to help this because it's like having issues all right we're going to use the white bookbinding tape this stuff is really really really sticky so if you're going to do bookbinding you can use anything I mean you can use lots of things but this stuff isn't in for this purpose and once you get it stuck on there it is not going anywhere so if you have a little money to invest and you like bookbinding you might want to invest in some tape special tape and tools bring it a trim pushing it down so now it's fixed no longer wholly pushing the little loose pieces of paper that were in here into the tape to get this in I think this is the hard part getting this in I think this is going to be the harder part I might want to take this off all right let's do this as far as I'm doing it and I'm thinking about it that's probably what you should do too so you just have one layer but if you have problems like I did with mine you're going to have to take this off anyway to put tape here to fix the problem with this first page and then go ahead and tape this on like I don't think there's any way to avoid that let's put some tape on this I don't think that spine's going anywhere now now we just need to get it back in the book block so then my question still becomes how to get it in the book block do I want to just tape it in do I want to glue it in I want to get it in or tape it in I could tape it in I could tape the whole thing in it's bookbinding tape that actually might be a good idea okay I think I'm going to do a combination of tape and glue I think that's what I feel confident in doing I've used some large binder clips to um clips that book block together so it stays where I want it to and I'm going to tape it in with white tape on the inside and then I'm going to go around with black tape on the outside I think and so that I take these off giving me a new spine it's not the prettiest thing on the planet but it will work hopefully I did it not upside down nope I did it upside down holy cow let's do that again shall we to be fair I'm not sure if I'm going to cut it out or not but I already did it upside down once so I just fixed it we've still got our bookmark so I can still go to the next page and mark mark that I might want to put a little charm or something at the bottom yeah that works now I do think I want to like not leave this like this I think I want to glue these and or cover this with something that's like pretty so let me get out the yes okay so I'm going to paste this to here and then I'm going to use some of these watercoloury prints from printing with my art foamies to put that here on the inside and sort of cover up some of what's going on there I don't I don't think I care too much about this side but I think I don't want to just put some of this here I might not even cover up the whole thing we'll see but let's first let's get the flap glued together push the glue now yes paste takes a long time to dry so you have time to manipulate it if you don't think get things on straight right away I still have my large clips here so I can now if you do this right put you're gonna need a clip that's big enough to hold the whole book but if you put it on here and then you angle it like it might help hold the book up so that it's up and it's out of the way and sturdy and you can get in here and do what you need to easily unless you do that and you bump it I'm going to put some more yes paste on this try not to get too thick of coating put the whole thing on there so you're going to do a better job at this of standing your book upright than I am going to push this into the glue again turn it around and use my craft knife to trim this piece of sea glass from a neighbor she brought it back from a trip she went on so that was perfect to put on pretty happy with the way this turned out so if you're having a journal that's starting to look more like this and you want it to look like this think about just disassembling it a bit and adding to the spine the spine part here won't look pretty unless I actually take the signatures apart and resew them that being said the way I've done this I could do that if I decide to do that at a later date because I didn't glue this part down so all I would have to do is cut it here and here and pull the text block out un-stitch it and re-stitch it and wider and take pages out I don't really want to do that right now um but we'll let that happen later we'll see how it goes so anyway there we go I wish they just made them like this to begin with maybe someday they'll get a clue and that's it for the minute it's a beautiful day out hopefully we can get some walking in I don't know but it is a gorgeous day outside and I don't think we have like two days with no rain so yay all right I'll be back