Monday, September 17, 2012

Monday

It's been a quiet day. Made an appt. with the CPA for next week and found my errant glucometer. Had a busy weekend, not as busy as the baby who partied two days in a row, one at the Highland Games and the next at his cousin's b'day party. He was wonderful.

I did manage to do a page yesterday related to the Games. On the left and not pictured is an ephemera page related to the games and what I bought for self/family. It was a lovely, warm day. Saw a few friends. It was also wonderful in that family was able to drop me off close to the wonderful shade trees! Oh the joy of listening to bagpipes and seeing the dancers! I heard but couldn't see the caber toss from where I was, but I did enjoy the parade of Clans.

Highland Girl...not the best pic, but, hey! She resides in my journal.


Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Painting Girls

My watercolor sketchbook is filling up with girls. I plop most of them and the progress on Facebook (Morgan Belinda Watson) and forget that I have a blog that could use some fancying up. So, here goes with a few pics from recent endeavors:





Monday, September 03, 2012

Binding Watercolor Papers


This started out as an adventure to make a watercolor journal for under $24.95 or approximately $15 after a coupon and to have double the paper in the commercial ones. It worked...perhaps not as I wanted, but it worked. I took two 11" x 15" pads to the local Staples to have them cut them in half, use the backboard for covers and bind with at least a 1.5" spiral binding. Ahem. What I got was a "substituted covers" mess and a tight 1" ring. Fortunately, even the manager couldn't figure out why they futzed the job this badly and refunded me for the cost. Somehow they wanted to charge me for cutting each sheet of the much thinner and too small cover product with the cuts costing $2 each.

I didn't invest much in the pads. They were on sale for 50% off so they cost $7 each. The binding should've cost no more than $6 each. So, for $13, I was going to have heavy covers, 60 sheets of a usable 7" x 11", 140-lb, watercolor page and the ability to decorate the covers to the high heavens. For folks old enough to know what that phrase means, it means "wildly" to me.

Instead, "Nick" substituted thin cardboard and bound the paper too tightly. Yes, I could un-spiral the bind and remove paper...but I'm risking damaging the spiral itself to do this since he cut it sooooo damn short it can't be bent back to hold. Why use 1" binding spirals on thick stacks of paper? Ugh!

Anyway, I did end up with two journals, sadly for free since they messed up the cuts and binding so much that even "Dan" (General Manager) didn't just refund the extra money for cuts I didn't order, but for the whole thing since it was pretty obvious that it was a mess. The key here is I had them note on the order to call me if there was a problem or any added costs. If you decide to make any of these for yourself since they cost so much less than buying two $25 journals to equate to each one, make sure you ask your copy store to put that on the order form.

In the end I have two, futzy, 60 page journals. I'm going to try to strengthen the covers, form some sort of a wrap-around covering for the bulging pages. All-in-all, I'd go back to Office Max where they seem to be able to do this sort of thing. Good news is, for around $13, you can have double the paper, bound with a cover of your choice, awesome watercolor journal...if you choose your office supply store carefully.

And, if you're so inclined, you could mix it up with wonderful, heavy scrap paper to give yourself some  already-made backgrounds...just for fun and inspiration!

The 20 Min. Pic


Rain?