Sketchbook Rebinding Project - complete! (Patreon)

I hope you will forgive the tardiness of this update, I'm still in the middle of prepping my condo for sale (moving out, effectively) while also barricading myself inside for a record-breaking heat wave. Fun. Anyway I wanted to update you all on the sketchbook rebinding project! This was my big "quarantine project" which started here in this post. If you want to see what the content of these books are like, you can see a sampling in this post. 

But the good news is... I finished it! Wow! It's very satisfying (and relieving) to have all of those sketchbooks condensed down to this tidy stack. (Obito above for scale). 

Sometime after university I switched to a smaller format of sketchbook. These ones were saddle stitch bound, and so in order to re-assemble them I had to chop all of the signatures in half. Then, I rebound them using the same Japanese-Binding method described in the first post. 

Sakura investigates my handiwork. I saved the original covers from the sketchbooks because I had covered them all with cool stickers, but since these ones were a little thinner kind of cardstock, I needed to reinforce the inner edges with some washi. I think it turned out nice. 

Here's the other final stack! In this view you can see how all of the individual sets of bound pages line up when they're bound together. I think it looks neat!

As far as content goes, these more recent sketchbooks don't have anything you haven't seen before...

.. but when I make my sketchbooks I'm constantly jumping from one project to the next. As a result a project like the food zine (don't forget to eat) was spread over several sketchbooks. Now when I'm cleaning them up I'm able to have them all in one set. Ahhhh, nice. 

I've also been trying to clean up other things that I don't feel like I need anymore. One of the big ones was the originals from the early days of Wasted Talent. These are drawn with ballpoint pen, usually on lined loosleaf paper. Obviously they have a lot of sentimental value... but not a lot of practical value as an artifact/record. I decided that anything that was worth keeping had already been scanned and cleaned up for the webcomic, so I just slapped those into a file and printed off a bound copy with Print on Demand. 

Boom! Big stack of paper gone. Whew!

I also did a lot of other handicrafts throughout quarantine. I sat in a lot of virtual meetings (especially in the beginning) and for bandwidth/VPN reasons our cameras are usually off. I found it very difficult to pay attention in these meetings without a point of focus ( other people's faces) so I started doing things to keep my hands busy. At first I folded paper stars...

This is just a selection, most of this paper is left over from making the first run of the food zine!

I also tried making some bracelets... but then I decided to save my embroidery thread for the sketchbooks (which was a good choice). 

Eventually I turned my attention to sewing, which ended up being the perfect balance of keeping my hands busy while keeping my brain free. 

I sewed a bunch of patches onto this weird vest...

Many many patches

On a lark I decided I wanted to see if I could turn T-shirts into yarn in order to crochet my own weighted blanket because someone I saw on twitter had done that... as it turns out it takes way more T-shirts than I had available to shred so instead I just finger-crocheted some washcloths...

Anyway I guess the long and the short of it is I'm glad things are opening up again because I was absolutely starting to lose my mind. 

But! At least my sketchbooks are dealt with....