Polymer Clay, Bookbinding, and Keith Smith

16 November 2007

Lillian’s Journal

Posted by Lady Artisan under: General Bookbinding .

I had a customer order a customized 6″ x 4″ journal from me. My standard designs for the personalized journals are pretty straightforward–a vintage-look journal with beige, worn and scratched looking covers; a girly journal with pink covers lightly textured with lace and a love letter rubber stamp on the inside covers; and a green, garden journal with small plant elements impressed into the covers and simple relief leaves.

As the customer and I were communicating, she explained that she loved the book (and movie) The Secret and that she would love to have something that reminded her of that for keeping her own personal encouragement and inspiration in. So I found some pictures of the book cover for The Secret and thought about how to get that faded writing, old text and brownish-reddish color while still doing something that was me.

I almost immediately came up with the idea of layering the cover designs–doing some kind of stamping and designs in a base sheet and covering that sheet with a very thin layer of translucent clay. The idea being that the stamped words and geometric designs on the bottom layer would look faded and more like the background with the translucent layer on top. And I started thinking about possibly cutting out a piece of an old map to put on the bottom layer–almost collage like but not originally with the intention of doing a full collage.

I decided I would start with a test run. I’d make a small sheet of ecru clay, rubber stamp some words and patterns in it and bake it. Then I’d use burnt umber acrylic paint and antique the sheet so that the words and designs would stand out a little. I cut out a small picture of a colorful butterfly and pasted it to the sheet and then applied a super thin layer of translucent clay over all of this. Before curing, I lightly stamped some words into the trans layer and then cured again. Once out, I antiqued and then buffed the trans layer. I know I could’ve gotten an even shinier gloss on the trans by sanding but since this was a test run I was just getting a feel for whether it would work or not. It worked like a charm and I really liked the look.

Next step was making it work in a bigger size. After looking over a picture of The Secret’s cover again, I decided that I didn’t want any collage elements on the front and back cover but thought I would use them on the inside covers. But I did like the idea of using pictures of old maps (I bought a calendar on sale at Borders because it was a calendar of old maps–perfect for this project) and possibly some other pictures or snippets of paragraphs from old books and magazines.

First was to figure out the visible sides. I made two sheets of clay in ecru in the proper size (4″ x 6″). Using a variety of word and paragraph stamps that I have (a French letter, a love letter, etc.), I stamped different areas of the cover, leaving the very center somewhat clear. I did do some very light stamping but, from the picture of The Secret, the center of the front cover looks almost like there’s light shining from it so I wanted that area to be lighter than the rest with little wording showing. I also used a texture sheet with mandalas on it and stamped a couple of areas with the spiral images.

 I did pretty much the same on the back outside cover except I wasn’t particular about leaving any clear areas. I also used some ancient and modern Chinese writing stamps and some Mayan glyph designs that I had to add some ancient elements.

Before curing, I flipped both sheets over and very lightly stamped some of the worded and Chinese stamps and portions of the mandalas texture sheet. Then I cured both sheets. So far, so good. After curing, I antiqued all sides with burnt umber acrylic paint and let it dry. Then I very lightly pounced some burnt umber and some Nickel Azo Quinacridone to make a violet-brown color on the covers.

 Collage time next. I found some pictures and quotes that I thought would be good for this book (a picture of Confucious and quotes from him; a quote from Albert Einstein; some pictures of old maps, etc.). Cut out what I wanted and glued them onto the two inside covers with tacky glue (I like Aileen’s Quick-Dry Tacky).  While they were drying, I rolled out a super-duper-ultra thin sheet of translucent (on the thinnest setting of my pasta machine–love those non-stick rollers). Once the glue was dry, I laid the translucent layer over the inside covers and smoothed it along the edges, trying to make sure that there was no air trapped in between the layers. I failed at the air pocket thing but I liked the way it looked in the end anyway.

Front inside cover:

Back inside cover:

I stamped lightly with the word stamps onto the translucent and cured both covers again. Which is where it got a little interesting. I pulled the covers out of the oven to discover that the translucent clay had cracked around the edges of most of the collaged elements. Yikes! What to do?

 First I tried conditioning some translucent until it was very soft and pressing it into the cracks, smoothing it out as I went and hoping that it would fill in without leaving any obvious “fixed” areas. That was a bust. The pictures were coming loose on the edges so adding clay in the cracks wasn’t strong enough. I switched to liquid clay, painted it on around the edges of all of the pictures and other ephemera and cured the covers for a third time. It worked beautifully because it gave the inside covers a wonderful unevenness that added to the look and feel of the collages.

Again to the outside covers for the final layer. I did another super-duper-ultra thin layer of translucent and applied it to the outside covers, smoothing it along the edges of the covers. Then lightly stamped with the word and geometric stamps on the trans clay. On the back cover, I had some single word, self-inking stamps (words like “imagine,” “dream,” “hope,” etc.) so I used those randomly across the back cover.

To finish off the front cover, I used some frilly letter stamps and put the word ”Secret” near the top and Lillian’s name at the bottom.

And the final piece was the red medallion. I had just purchased a bag of curtain hooks with what I suppose were large mums or some other flower as the decorative portion. I thought that the design would be perfect for the medallion on this book so I made a mold using some waaaayy old Alley Goop two-part silicone mold putty (which you can find here). Made my medallion from the mold and then added in a Swarovski crystal sterling silver bead.

The final steps were to cure the covers for the last time, antique front and back to highlight the stamped words and designs, and then sanding and buffing to give it a nice shine.

And the final product:

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