Gelli print journal

What happens when you have lots and lots of gelli prints and you don't know what to do with them? You start looking for inspiration. My search led me to this lovely page. I didn't feel like I had the energy to go the whole way to assembling a proper bound book, but I found some sites that show the steps for binding pages together using a simple stitching method. Stitching I can do. And that was definitely worth a try. All I needed was an awl. Well, I didn't even know the word in English until three days ago! But our local DIY store sold them and it was only €3.99 (it's "poinçon" in French in case you're wondering)

I still have a lot to figure out - like maybe binding the pages together before I print on them, so that the patterns work across the spine. And maybe I will go to the next stage where you glue booklets together and even make a proper hard cover. I'm not good with glue.So it's baby steps for now.

Over the weekend, I made a couple of booklets that I will be using for art journaling and collages, all set with pretty gelli-printed backgrounds. So let's focus on that.

The next step for me is to figure out a way to photographs these booklets in a way that shows them at their best. Maybe a little video will do the trick?

Here is the cover of the one I stitched at the weekend. That alone was worth my while, I think.




And the centre-page, which shows the stitches nicely:

And a few other pages:

And some that maybe are not so good, but once I've journalled into them will probably work out ok:

And the final page, which I think is particularly lovely: