Red. I’ve been using Eco-Flo for dying the leather–they’re water-based colors (dyes and highlighters) for leather sold by Tandy–and their Scarlet is a nice, rich red. Their All-In-One stain and finish is awful but the dye and highlighters are pretty nice, although getting a really even spread on the dyes isn’t always easy unless you’re using a darker color. For me, they’re perfect, though, because I much prefer the less even look anyway.

These designs always start out simple and then grow into rather complex and involved projects that have me researching something online and spending more time than I ought on detailing a piece. On the upside, I find a lot of really fascinating websites that I never knew existed. For instance, e-Leo, which is an online archive of da Vinci’s diaries and papers (you have to register with this site for access–I imagine they’re protecting copyrights with that–but it’s well worth it).

Although da Vinci is well before the Victorian era, where most Steampunk seems to live, the inventions and ideas he came up with fit rather neatly with the “feel.” And, considering that the mechanical clock was invented in the 13th or 14th century (at least a century before Leonardo), it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch for me to land on da Vinci at least once while working on one of these.

Truthfully, though, the idea came because I had some stray black marks show up on the inside of the journal and I didn’t want to dye the inside covers this time, so I started thinking about what kind of design I could do on the inside to incorporate my mistakes rather than cover them up. It started me thinking about some of da Vinci’s journal pages with the sketches and mirror writing, so I decided to do something along those lines.

I’m not going to show the whole of the inside covers yet…once I’ve sold the book and the customer has a chance to look them over and “decipher” them, I’ll post them on my blog.

As for the rest of the book, black is such a nice complement to red, so I went with black velvet for the spine and black suede for the strap. The clasp/closure is part of the watch band from the watch cover I used on the front (the bottom cover with the clockwork gears). It makes an interesting closure and works surprisingly well.

The molded decorations that help hold the watch face  and watch cover in place are made with Apoxie Sculpt (a two-part epoxy clay), then painted with blackened bronzer. I used molds for part of the decoration, a leather stamp for part of it and did the rest by hand.

The paper is a mix of ivory and beige pastel paper, tea-stained watercolor paper and some naturally aged Arches watercolor paper that I got at an estate sale. The clockwork design, this time, is simpler than usual. If I’m not careful, I can spend literally days laying out a good clockwork design, so I opted for simple to reduce the time spent. Which turned out to be a good idea after I added the da Vinci aspect.

As usual, these journals give me a chance to practice my storytelling. They always seem to have some kind of “history” behind them, which is part of the appeal for me, personally. I enjoy coming up with the background to explain what their purpose is and what kind of person might have owned them. For the background on this one or if you think you can’t live without it, check my Etsy shop.

And, finally, a picture of the book “in action.” I know the listing says that the sellers have never tried it out but how can anyone resist having a couple of “extra” hours to get some things done?

My Steampunk designs have been relying on combining lots of metal with paper and leather. I’m very particular about how I place the watch parts inside a watch cover on my main designs. I am not quite skilled enough yet (and I haven’t really had the time or made it) to figure out how to make a clockwork design on one of these journals that actually functions, but I like them to LOOK like they might work or might have worked at some point in time. My eventual goal is to make some that have functioning parts, gears that work, a crank that turns, etc., but I’m not quite there yet.

One of the hardest aspects of all this is securing the watch parts, metal tubing and other base metal pieces to the leather or book board. I can’t wrap wire around everything to make it stay put so I’ve been relying on some good, strong glues (JB Weld, for instance) that work fine but sometimes leave me thinking that I could be doing something further to secure these pieces. I’ve even gone so far as to try soldering (on my last TDB, I used quite a bit of soldering) but will likely not do that again very often since I found my control of the solder was pretty lame.

Well, this small Steampunk matchbook notepad that I’ve been sharing pictures of throughout this post has given me a new vision. I had to carve a circle in the leather–just enough for the watch crystal/cover to sit down in it and be secure. The clockwork design was glued onto the natural leather in the center of the circle and then I glued the watch cover over it and attached the copper tube on the outside. The JBWeld worked great for holding things in place but the design of this particular notepad is different than a solid front cover with book board under the leather. The matchbook has to open and close which, of course, bends the leather. As soon as I opened and closed the book once, I could see a problem–the top of the watch cover was coming lose because of the folding/bending of the leather. NOT a good thing.

I’d never had this particular situation come up before, of course, so it was the first time I had to figure out a solution for it. Which might explain why it had never occurred to me that I could use Apoxie Sculpt (a two-part epoxy clay that sticks to EVERYTHING) to help secure these metal parts to my books. But that wasn’t actually the epiphany. I started working with the clay, putting a snake of black clay around all the edges of the watch case (why not add extra security) and making a bigger snake at the top to help keep it from separating from the leather everytime the book was opened.

As I was working with the Apoxie Sculpt, adding some designs to the top portion that would be more visible, it hit me (yes, I’ll admit I’m a little slow sometimes). I can use the Apoxie Sculpt for attaching the clockwork parts and metal pieces AND I can sculpt with them a bit so it’s decorative! Ok, so it’s not much of an epiphany but it was a pretty good one for me since it solves my securing/attaching concerns and it adds some great design elements to my books.

Which brings me to this little beauty which will be going in my Etsy shop soon. I’m calling it the Clockwork Kladde (a German word that’s supposed to mean book, notebook or jotter). It’s a technological wonder–designed to take notes for you automatically. Of course, it doesn’t function anymore so you’ll have to take those notes yourself, but it sure looks cool.

Everyone knows that the first and most important key to selling online is to take good photos. Buyers are likely to be making a decision to purchase something based mainly on the photos you share and, only secondarily on the description you give. If you don’t catch their eye with the photo, then you’ve already lost the sale. I’ve recently realized how important this visual element is while doing some online shopping myself. I find myself hesitant to buy anything online if there isn’t a photo in the listing showing me what I’m buying. I’m talking about more mundane things, as well–not just artwork/handcrafted items (which is a no-brainer when it comes to needing photos) but also for things like supplies I buy online. Eyelets, for instance. They don’t normally look any different from one manufacturer to the next. Other than color or size, do I really need to see a photo? But I still find myself more willing to put those items in my cart if there’s an image associated with the description. I find myself going back more regularly to the online companies with color photos in their shops rather than the ones that have simple text listings of their items or even black and white sketches (although American Science & Surplus is one exception to this rule).

I’m not going to even pretend that I can tell you how to take better pictures from a technical perspective. Heck, I don’t even have the technique part down myself–I use the flash on my camera way too much because I’m too lazy to actually put my head into setting up a proper lighting and background set in my current studio.

What I really want to talk about here are teaser photos. Which is my name for those abstract detail shots that a seller uses as their main photo in their listing. The idea is to show just enough of the item to catch a buyer’s attention and make them wonder what the rest of the piece looks like. Do they always work? Probably not. And I’ve never done any in-depth, or even cursory, studies to see how effective they are. I have seen that my items tend to get more views if I use a more dramatic main shot for the listing rather than a full item photo showing the whole piece at once. I think that for some items, it’s more effective to show the whole thing and for some items, people will be more apt to check it out if they can’t quite see it all.

So, yes, I’ve been sharing various detail shots that I took of my new Steampunk Journal. One thing I do for my abstract shot is take several different ones. When I first started doing the detail shots, I would take one or, at the most, two different details. Occasionally, I got really lucky and came up with something excellent, like this shot of my Serenity journal (which could almost be considered Steampunk–velvet, leather, and a watch crystal on the cover):

I’ve found that I don’t get lucky that often so I started taking numerous detail shots to make sure I get at least one that I like. In this case, I like almost all of them but decided against a couple of them because they showed too little. The corner detail shots have too little of the book in them and I don’t feel like they inspire people to actually go look at the item to see the rest.

The front cover at an angle seemed to have too much in it–too much of the overall book and too much background. So I decided against using that one. I finally opted for one of the spine shots because it showed a little bit of a hinge rod, some of the copper sheet and hinges, a bit of the copper tubing and a tiny sliver of the clockwork design on the cover. The background is subtle enough to not get in the way.

But, depending on how long this one hangs around my shop and studio, I may switch out the detail shots to see how they affect the number of views I get.

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The spine wasn’t as difficult as you might think. Truthfully, I hate doing limp bindings where the text block is sewn directly onto the cover/spine and there are no boards to stiffen the covers. I find it very difficult to sew the signatures in place along the spine that way, for some reason. I much prefer sewing onto tapes or simply sewing the text block together with a simple stitching pattern and then attaching the tapes or the spine reinforcement to the boards/covers as a whole. Much easier for me. But I really wanted to use copper mesh for the spine so I decided to do a rather simple sewing pattern to attach the signatures to the spine. I added the center embellishments separately from the text block sewing. The rivets came much later. The overall sewing wasn’t too difficult with no limp covers to get in the way.

Once I had the text block complete, including the spine, I worked on the covers. I already had a vague idea of making some kind of hinge to attach the covers to the spine/text block and was thinking I’d use rivets, copper tubing and, perhaps, leather hinges. Serendipity struck. A polymer clay group I’m on (CITY-o-Clay) sent through a couple of posts about making your own wire hinges and I knew that’s what I wanted to use for this book. I figured it wouldn’t be much problem to make the wire hinges and then use rivets to secure them to the covers and spine (ah, so naive).

My plan was to use leather on both covers and dye it a mellow tan color. I decided to do my corners a little different than normal. Usually I’ll trim off a triangle of leather at each corner so the leather is “mitred” together as evenly as possible on the inside corners. You get a slimmer corner that way. This time, I thought it would look better to simply fold the leather over on itself. I wanted the corners to look a little bulkier. The basic leatherwork was pretty straightforward. I had actually sketched out a design of the book earlier (see above photo) and had an idea of how I wanted to attach the clockwork embellishments but once I had the leather completed and stamped (but not dyed), I started laying out the parts to make sure the design would work. It did with just a bit of tweaking.

My biggest challenge with this piece was the clockwork designs. My problem is that I’m too anal to just take a bunch of gears and watch parts and glue them together in a somewhat artistic pile. I want the pieces to look like they work together, the clockwork to look like it just needs a bit of winding before it gears up and and you find yourself being transported back in time to meet Jules Verne. Which means that I spent a heck of a lot of time finding just the right gear or part to place next to the last one that was attached. It took quite awhile to find all the pieces that “fit” together properly.

I was very happy with the final piece. The book itself lies flat so sketching, journaling, drawing, painting (watercolor or acrylic should work) are all easy enough to do in this journal. The next one is definitely going to be larger.

This journal can be found in my Etsy shop along with the fun story I came up to explain its history.

Originally produced by a small, unknown manufacturer in southern Illinois called Stughmeier & Sons, this Temporal Displacement Book (TDB) is only one of seven TDB’s purchased from the company between 1842 and 1845. The day following the sale of the seventh TDB, the whole factory completely disappeared without a trace.

Each book was purchased by a separate individual in a private sales meeting made available by invitation only. The buyers were all chosen carefully for their adventurous spirits, interest in the unusual and fantastical, and, of course, for their obscene wealth.

This particular TDB that’s currently for sale is believed to be the first one made. It was purchased by Maximillian von Zeit, a close friend of the company owner, in June of 1842. Although von Zeit disappeared in the Fall of 1842, this book was recovered from his family’s estate earlier this year.

Unfortunately, the Time Displacement Unit (TDU) built into the book, is not currently functioning. But a resourceful individual may be able to restore it to working order. Seller is NOT responsible for personal, temporal or financial damage that may be caused by tampering with the TDU without sufficient knowledge or understanding of its workings.

Whether the TDU works or not, this is an excellent book to use as a personal or art journal. Apparently von Zeit used his TDB regularly to go back to 1842 and “erase” his journal entries, leaving plenty of space for someone else to chronicle their own adventures. Although his only living descendant, Joshua von Zeit, believes that it’s more likely his great-great-great-grandfather Maximillian actually went back to 1842 and stole a second book.

At the present time, the locations of the other six (seven?) TDB’s are unknown.

On a side note, the pictures of my journal also show off the small photo set I made using builder’s foam, scrapbook paper, and glue.