How to Make a Big Book How to Make a Junk Journal Tome Part1 Step by Step DIY Tutorial for Beginners

Hi everybody. Want to make a big book? This is Pam at the Paper Outpost and today we are making a big book. This could be called a tome. A tome is a large, sometimes scholarly book. Sometimes it's a volume of many volumes of scholarly books. But in our world today, this is going to be a big book. So I'm going to call this a tome. And a tome to me is a fatter book that houses lots of pages, lots of signatures, is constructed with a little bit more strength and a few different items and a few different techniques that I want to show you. Now, first, that being said, you don't need to use any of these techniques or any of these items in order to create your tome. You can certainly do it with simple items and it will still work. But I'm just going to introduce you to a few more things just so you can see some new techniques and tips. So there's going to be a lot of tips and techniques throughout this video. And this video will be a multi-part series which I will release all on the same day so that you can just watch the whole thing if you want to binge watch it and just make a tome. So let's make a book. Let's make a big book today. That's really all it is. And I'm just going to give you a tour. I'm not going to take you through a flip through this because there's really nothing in it other than the pages. But I just wanted to show you the style we're going to do today. And I'm going to show you how to do this raised embossed finish as well, which is a nice way to decorate the front cover of a book with painting and embossing, which is very easy, very fun. And if you've never done it, it's worth exploring. And I'm just going to, I'm going to also show you this technique on how to decorate your inside covers. It's very fun, very pretty. Okay. All right. So this is an example of one tome. Here's her side. And we're going to do one very similar to this book. All right. Let me just show you a couple others. Now they don't all have to be dark. They can be pink and you know, completely a different style with this has lace as the spine cover. And this has a coffee splatters and things like that on it. So this is also that raised embossed technique, which I will show you today and how to do that. And this has more of a shiny surface. The other one was more of a matte surface, just different looks. And one more, just for an example, here's another one I made a while back. And this is also a painted surface with dry brushing over it. Big fat one. She's been moderately stuffed. It was a Valentine journal that I had made a while back. And she also has some spine ribs on her. So, okay, let's do this. All right. So I'm going to move this and show you what we're going to do. All right. Okay. So what I'm using today is some heavyweight chipboard. And this chipboard is approximately, I think it's 0.46 centimeters thick. You can get a thin, medium or thick, and that probably different companies have different thicknesses, but I'm using the thick from this one company. And I think it's 0.4 or 0.46 centimeters. So that's the thickness I'm going for. It's not quite as thick as bookboard or the cover of a book. And you could certainly use the cover of a book in this circumstance, if you don't have bookboard or if you don't have a heavy chipboard. But there will be links below down in my Amazon store to all the products that I use if you're interested in checking them out. Okay. So here we go. This is a thicker chipboard. And now the biggest thing about chipboard is it's harder to cut. So it's not so much that it's harder. It just takes a little longer to cut. So I'm going to walk you through the entire process. I'm not going to skip anything other than maybe drying time or something like that. But I want you to see every step and you're more than welcome to speed through if you want to zoom through some parts, but certainly I want to walk you through it if you've never seen this before. So I'm going to take a regular crafting knife. Okay. And I would recommend, you know, if you've never used one of these before, get a pair of pliers and get some eye goggles on and go ahead and snip that off. It breaks off. These are little breakable pieces. So you have a sharp blade to work with and then retract that when you're not using it. Now, I like to buy the 9 by 12 size because my journals are mostly 9 by 6, which is a nice, easy working number. And you only need to cut it once. And then you have your front and your back cover with one cut, sort of one cut. I'll show you. It actually takes about 6 or 7 or sometimes 8 or 9 cuts to get through this. But once you're through, that's pretty good. You've got your covers. Okay. So let's go ahead and get that part done. So I'm going to use the cutting mat to square up everything here so that I know that I'm going to cut a straight line. And I'm going to get a metal ruler. You can use any ruler, but I like the metal one because I can get close to the edge. I'm going to count over 9 squares. These are all 1 inch squares. 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm sorry. I'm going to count over 6. 12 divided by 2 is 6. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Okay. So I know where my middle is. And I'm going to... Did I say this is Pam at the Paper Outpost? Hi, everybody. It's Pam at the Paper Outpost. Align it with that line and with this line. Then I should be straight if all my corners are in the correct place. Okay. So let's go ahead and cut. And you want to do firm, slow, eye on the blade at all time cut close to the ruler. 1, 2. It's going to take several passes. 3. Firm but not killing it. 4, 5, 6, 7. I'm getting close. I can feel it. 8. Okay. It took 8 that time. You never know. It all depends usually on the sharpness of your blade. Okay. So now we have our two covers, our front and back. So that's already done. Yay. Okay. We're halfway there. All right. So now what we're going to do next is we are going to take another piece and we need to make the spine. Now with this particular tome, I'm going to use a two and a half inch spine. You can use any size you like. You can go bigger, smaller, totally up to you. But two and a half inches is going to house five signatures with about 12 pages. That's going to be a very packed tome here. So just show you what it looks like. These are five signatures. A signature is the little mini booklet inside the booklet inside the book. So I have one, two, three, four, five of those. And each one of these has 12 full pages in it that I fold in half. Okay. So they're full pages, 12 full pages per signature. Okay. All right. There we go. All right. So now I need a two and a half inch piece off of this. Let's do that. Measuring it up here. Where's my ruler? There she is. I have to put on my serious pants on here to do all this. Cause like, like this high tech. No, it's not really actually, there's not much difference between this type of bookmaking and other journal bookmaking. Other than these products are a little bit sturdier. Okay. So one, two and a half. The half mark, if you've never seen this before is that little dot on the cutting mark and the dot down here. So that's what you're going to be aligning one, two, three, align the dots. And then you're at the half mark and you know, you could do three quarters or something, but you have to guesstimate there a little bit with this one. All right. I'm going in. I'm checking my corners. Everybody's squared up one. Don't hurry this part to be safe. Three, four. Now, if you don't have this and you're doing this with a thinner pieces of chipboard or cardboard that you're gluing together, go ahead and cut them all separately. And then at the end, I would recommend just going around and using the sanding block to make the edges feel like they're part of one piece. Glue the edges together very well. Like I said, you don't need this particular chipboard. It's just, it's nice to have. So it's a nice to have, if you have it. Look for it on the back of drawing pads. A lot of artists pads have thicker chipboard. That's another great resource for this thicker chipboard material. I'm almost there. That's my test. Not there yet. Almost. This could be it. Almost here. Okay. We are free. We're almost free. We are free. All right. So there I have my spine. Retracting. Clearing the deck. It's always good to clear the decks. Take off any pieces that you're not using because they can get confused with what you're working on. Okay. Expect my video to roll over at around the 30 to 33 minute mark into the second video. That could happen. I might be distracted. Just want to let you know. Okay. So we have this and that is good. So, so far we are working with this and with this. Looking good, right? Okay. So starting to look like a book. Not taking too long. Now, I also, since I'm in the cutting mode, I'm going to cut the ribs of my spine. And I happen to have a little piece left over, but just to make it easier, I'm just going to go ahead and use this piece. This might be a little bit thick. Let me see. I think it'll be okay. Maybe I'm just going to make two of these. Okay. So I'm going to make two of these. You can do two or three or four or five, however many you like. They can be as thick or as thin as you like. But for simplicity's sake, I'm going to make these just a little shy of two and a half inches. So more like two and a quarter inches. So I'm squaring. Okay. One, two and a half. So I know where that is. So I'm going to go a little bit shorter than that. You don't want it right to the edge of your spine because it, it, it will feel better in the book when you hold it in your hand. If it's a little shy of the two and a half. So I would say like two and three quarters is good. Two and seven eighths, anything like that. Okay. I think I'm going to cut this. I think I'm going to cut it. Yes. I'm going to make a mark on it. I don't know if I can cut it. I'm going to try two and a half. It's just going to be wiggly under my hand. I don't want that. Okay. You can also use a guillotine cutter for this. So yeah, scissors cut this just fine. Okay. So actually I think I'm going to make it a little thinner too. I don't want it to be so thick. All right, here we go. Oh, much better. Okay. Yeah. All right. So now that I have that, all I need to do is draw around with a pencil. Now I know where to cut and I want to cut inside of the line because the line is on the outside. So you don't want it to be too big. So you can always trim it. Here we go. Yeah. This is not so bad when you're just doing a little cut. I guess you could actually just use scissors to cut the paper too or the chipboard. I'm just going a little on the inside. I'll go this way and there we go. Okay. How'd I do? How'd I do? Are they pretty close? They are pretty close. Okay. And pretty close is good. All right. So I have two of these. Do I want a third? Maybe I should do a third. Yes. Let's do three. So we have three and you can see what it looks like. Just like I did the other one. Just taking you through the process here. This is a tutorial. So lots of details. You get to see the good, bad and the ugly. Let's hope it's mostly good. All right. You know, it's so funny. I make these things night and day nonstop. And you know, when somebody is watching me make it, all of a sudden it changes everything. I'm nervous all of a sudden. But so far so good. Yeah. There we go. I think some of these are a little longer than others. Let me just trim this guy. Don't want it too fat. Okay. I was testing my links. Okay. You might be a little long. Let's just get a little shiver off for you. Okay. A little shiver off for you. Okay. All right. So I have these elements so far. Retract. Clear my decks. This is what I have. I have my spine. I'm going to have my spine, my front and back cover. And then I have these three that are going to go on here when I'm ready. Okay. I'm just testing to make sure that they don't go over the edge. Don't want them to go over the edge. Okay. And they don't. So everything is a-okay. Very easy. All right. So next we're going to assemble the cover. And this is quite simple. Let me grab the Tyvek tape. I'm going to use Tyvek tape for this. Where did I put it? I've got to find it. There it is right in front of me where I left it. And Tyvek tape is a very strong tape with a very strong glue. I'm going to give you some options for this. But this is the one I generally prefer to work with just because I can rely on it. I know it's very strong. It's never going to tear. Okay. They use this when they're building houses and it is water resistant. Blah blah blah. Okay. So it's a great tape. What you can also use if you don't have Tyvek tape is you can use a Tyvek envelopes that you get in the mail. They're the white kind of they're soft envelopes but they're very hard to tear. You get them from the post office. You can glue them in place instead of using the tape. The only thing is that it will not tear but you're as strong as your glue is. So that's one notch down. One notch down below that would be duct tape. A very strong duct tape would be good. And one notch down for that would be a packing tape, like a clear packing tape. And if I was going to use that I would probably use a heavy duty packing tape just for to handle the strength because your spine needs to be strong in this case because it's going to handle a lot of signatures and potentially a lot of weight if you over stuff it like a chunky monkey like I like to do. Okay. So now what we do here, very simple process, we're just going to line up our little elements here to where we want them. And what we're looking for is a distance of about one quarter of an inch between the spine and the cover. So let's just align that. A little more is better than a little less or else your book will not close comfortably. So if you're worried if you should do a little more, a little less, edge for more. Okay so I'm going to do that. It looks pretty much aligned to me. I'm going to take a little piece of tape. Don't get stuck down. And you're stuck down. Okay I'm going to take a little piece tape. It got stuck on me. Okay we take a little piece of Tyvek tape because I had no yeah let me actually let me use the uh let me use this because it's clear. I'm going to use this and I've used my teeth there but you shouldn't use your teeth. That's what my mother always said. And I'm just going to put that here. Push it down really well on either side because that's going to help this from migrating around while I'm trying to tape it with the Tyvek tape. Now the Tyvek tape is super strong. Okay so you want to just do this once and nail it the first time and you can't pull it up and reposition it. Where it goes it goes. You don't want too much of the Tyvek tape on the cover but you want enough to grab securely. Okay so um actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a tiny bit of tape and I'm just going to anchor the top and I'm going to anchor the bottom so we don't have a run around. Nobody likes run around. Okay there we have that. Okay so here we go. Now you're going to go longer longer than your piece. Okay because we're going to do a wraparound. Okay I have longer than my piece and use my teeth again but you really should cut it. Okay now I'm going to go on to the book cover but not too much and the reason why I'm not going too much on the book cover but I am going on the book cover number one on it for security number two not too much because paint will not stick to Tyvek tape so just be wary of that but we're going to handle that. What I want you to do is take this hold it around like that and then take this hold it like that and there you go. Okay I think I got a little tiny extra piece down here. I don't need this piece so I'm just going to shiver it off. What is this shiver word I'm using? I have no idea. Okay so that is good. Now I'm just going to go ahead and close this side off. This one doesn't have to go all the way around because it's already present. When this stuff grabs to itself it grabs like nobody's business. It is super strong. Okay like you literally are building a house with this. Okay now I'm going to go ahead and put the back cover. So as you see the book is going to fold like this. This is my front cover. This is the outside. This is my spine my back cover. Okay so I'm going to do the exact same process and this is pretty much the same basic setup for any little journal that you're going to make if you don't have to use the the stronger products but you're going to do your front your spine and your back and if you're going to use an old book you can cut off the front and back cover and then make a wider spine by doing this technique. Okay here we go. I'm making my little anchors. I am not going to sing anchors away although it's running through my head right now. All right here we go. Here we go. Yeah I would say just do one at the top and one at the bottom then you're not going to migrate. Okay I don't think we need the middle one. Stick that aside for future use. Get our Tyvek tape out and do the exact same thing. Longer piece or whatever tape you choose. Sorry you really don't want to do that. Yeah you just want to put it down once. It's very hard to pull up if you do it. All right you want to minimize your contact with the Tyvek tape because it will stick to you like like you know bees to honey. There you go. All right one more little piece and we are off and running. The actual book cover comes together relatively quickly and then you can settle into the decorating of the pages and the cover and all that type of thing and I am going to decorate the cover with you today because I want to show you how to do that raised embossed technique and it's very fun and very easy. Okay so now at this point you want to find where you left your bone folder which is right right nowhere. Okay yes it is it's here. Okay all right and what you want to do you don't take too much of the sharp end but you want to go in here and just get these the tape to stick to itself and that's going to make a very nice connection for your spine to your covers. Okay you don't have to drive it right through you don't want to poke it but you want to combine it. Okay so now we have this or we have this oops sorry it can go easily either way and there's no cracky dacky. It's no cracking sounds very smooth and very strong and very secure. So we are good. All right so now next thing we want to do is we want to paint our cover at this point. So I'm just going to get something that I could put under here while I paint and I'm going to use something today called black gesso which is basically black acrylic paint and I have a link for this below but black gesso is wonderful. We use white gesso all the time and I thought I would show some black gesso because black is amazing to work with and it gives a beautiful coverage and you don't have to worry about getting it too dirty or anything because you always it's black so it's very forgiving as opposed to the white. The white is going to show little marks and stuff like that. All right I'm just going to clean this a little bit because I was working with it yesterday and I didn't clean up after myself. I'm just going to everything everywhere. Okay so here we go. Let's open it up and let's paint away. This is actually kind of fun and it covers relatively quickly I would say. It doesn't take hundreds of coats or anything like that. I would say thin even coats is best. Long sweeping swaths is good unless you're going for a certain technique something like that but I'm just going for a basic black and I haven't even decided at this point what is my front or what is my back. I don't have to decide because my book is going to work in either direction. You want to remember to get the little sides of your book the edges and if the black gesso leaves some roughness on your edges you can come along with sanding block and just sand that off and then it will be nice and smooth which I will do as we progress. Okay just paint and paint and this is very fun very relaxing just covering it up. It's okay to go over the Tyvek tape but if you scratch it with your fingernail it will just come off but I'll show you how we'll do with that. It's a very easy technique so you don't have to worry about it coming off. Your tape of choice. I'm just going to go around the edges. Okay back up. Back up. All right hold on there. You're probably going to get painty if you're like me and you're not a neatnik and I've never been so I always keep baby wipes or wet wipes or a wet washcloth or wet paper towel something at the ready so that you can you know handle those little issues. I also store the paintbrush that I'm using in a plastic bag and sometimes I'll spritz a little bit of water in the bag just to keep it moist. So just a little a little tip there. Okay so put that aside. Close up my jar and let's see I need a little bit more there and I can always come back for touch-ups later. That's okay. So now this is going to dry and I am going to help it dry with this lovely little hot embossing tool and I'm going to do this. So I'm not going to torture you with that. I'm going to go ahead and help it dry and I'll be right back. Okay we're back and this is pretty much dry. I think it's just drying a little bit right there but I think it's going to be okay to turn over. Yeah I think it's all right. All right so that only took a couple minutes. Honestly that black gesso does dry very quickly and I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to do the same thing here because I am going to use some black color on the inside of my my book as well. So let's just carry on with the process and paint her up and I like to show you the techniques that I use to make books. I want everybody to learn how to make books and then if you're interested please share how to make a book. You know if you want to show other people how to make books or you want to make books and and things like that go for it because I think that this is such a wonderful life, enjoyable life skill to learn and you know paper is disappearing and we're going all digital and this makes, it kind of brings back the nostalgia of books and I love that. I think people really enjoy nostalgic things, things that we remember from days gone by, remind us of certain times, certain events in our lives and you know who knew that there wouldn't be that many books around. I mean you couldn't, you couldn't have convinced me of that back in the 80s. My books will always be here but books are fast and rapidly disappearing from existence and you know when we make more books we add more books to the supply so I think that is awesome. So I'm going to go ahead and dry this. I'm going to just make sure I've got my edges and like I said if you missed an edge or here or two you can always go back and ink it up a little bit more. There we go. Sticking this in the bag and back to this. Hang on. Okay at this point I have painted the front and the back and I would recommend at this point that you go around, you double check your edges and you feel for roughness and this is where our good old friend sanding block comes into play. It can really help a myriad of issues if you just run along here and do a little bit of this. You may have to paint it over it again but I recommend just smoothing everything down and sometimes I find that when I paint the edges, I would have done this before like just on the raw chipboard, but when I paint the edges they get a little bit rough so I am just going to feel for any roughness. That's nice and smooth. Yeah but if I feel any roughness I'm just going to, it may be the cut edge that has the roughness on it where we cut the two pieces apart but then just go back and dab those up with a little bit more paint. Okay checking for smoothness. All right smoothness and I think this is a, this particular sanding block has multiple surfaces but you can get them with fine, medium or coarse and I honestly just roll the thing in my hand. I don't even look to see what type it is. It all, it all sands. So let me just go ahead and touch up these. Might need a little bit more. Make it smooth. Okay and that side. All right I'm going to blow dry that. Okay and now I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to just paint up this side again just a little bit. This is all going to be sealed at the end so you won't have to worry about the Okay all right I'm going to just blow dry that. Be right back and I am saying blow dry loosely. This is a heat embossing tool. That is a heat gun embossing tool. Heat is focused without much, too much wind at a small point at the end. Now technically you could use a regular blow dryer because we're not working with little embossing flakes or embossing beads or embossing powder. So you're not going to blow anything away with this. So a blow dryer will work as well as a big heat gum that you might find in the hardware store. So a couple of options for you there. And now we have this. So the next thing we're going to do, I'm going to sit. Okay I'm so happy to sit. Okay here we go. I'm just going to bring you in a little closer and get you all lined up and then we can carry on. Don't need you anymore. You can see better without that. Okay next we're going to decide our front or back and the reason why we're deciding now is because we're going to put these little spine elements on and once we do that we have chosen our front versus our back or the inside versus the outside of the book. So I'm just going to test my book and just make sure that it's happy whichever way I want to flip it. And really this book is not telling me that it likes one way more than the other. I'm just going to look at the surfaces and I've decided that this is going to be my front cover. Okay so that means this is going to be the exterior spine. You're too close aren't you? That's okay you can just sit there for a sec. We'll rub it back up a little bit so you can see this better. Okay and so now I just I'm going to put these down and I would recommend sanding the edges of these just a little bit so they're a little smoother and rounder on the sides just so you don't have that sharp edge. You can do the sides. Totally up to you but I would definitely recommend doing the edges the these long edges. Okay yeah like that. Okay same thing. If you notice there's a little uppityness of the edge of the cardboard there. See that little sanding block is your best friend. It's gone. Okay so now we're going to go ahead and put these in place. Now just the decision as to where to put them and what to glue them with. I like to use Fabri-Fix glue. It's a clear silicone glue that binds fabric to paper very well. Fabric to fabric. Small metal objects do just about anything and think of it as a it's almost like a hot glue but there's no heat. So it's very strong and works very quick and I like it especially for strength and for video purposes. I can get my gluing done fast. You can use other glues. It's just going to take a little longer to dry if you use a wet white glue and you might get some wrinkling with the wet white glue but it will work as well. A lot of PVA glues even Elmer's glue will work but this is this is an easy glue. There's not a lot of weight on this or an easy thing to glue. I am just putting some glue on. Not too much. I'm going to use finger tool to spread it to the edges. I like to have good adherence and your first one will dictate really where your other one's going to go. You know you can do these any way you like but I'm going to put mine about an inch below the top. Okay and then I'll do this one an inch below the bottom. Oops sorry about that much glue. Can you see? Yep okay. I need a longer neck because my phone floats above my head. I can't quite see what you guys see all the time so but I periodically check and if I'm if you can't see just just holler. Okay can you see? Okay yep okay about an inch from the bottom. You can measure this. I am a favorite of the eyeball technique. I'm going to eyeball this and say that looks pretty close. I'm going to put the middle one smack dab in the almost middle with my eyeball technique. All right here we go. You can also use strings. You can cut some twine some thick twine or some strings bundle them together and use them here as spine ribs. All right how's that? That looks pretty good. All right so you want to let those set up. That is going to grab onto the Tyvek tape as well as the little piece where the cardboard is sticking through there or chipboard. There's my and I'm wiping the finger the finger tool clean and now I have black fingers for the rest of this video because I'm trying not to disappear on you. I'm probably going to roll over soon to part two just FYI if it has not happened yet and the next thing we are going to continue on is on this side. We are going to put a piece of fabric over this spine so it's going to look something like this. Okay and I'll show you what I use. All right here it is. Okay so what I do is I take I'm going to use something like this. This is a piece of eco-dyed fabric that I made and I just think it would look really cool with this book. I'm going for the mysterious looking book so this is kind of ratty tatty and looking like that but this if I can find them just have them. Oh yeah here they are. Okay I buy these at Walmart. They're nothing fancy. They look like this when they're they're newish. They're called flower sack tea towels or flower sack cloths and it's a great material. It's very thin. It's a cotton and it's very easy to tear that type of thing and it works great in junk journals. So here we go over there. All right but this one I did do some I played with it. Okay and okay so now all I do is I need to pick out a piece that I like and then I need to cut it or tear it so that it's bigger than this tape because you don't want the tape to be exposed because that will come right off. Okay all right so let's do this. I think I'm going to go for the lighter color because I think the contrast is better for this particular book. So let's do that. All right let's just do a little cut here and then do a tear. See how nice that is. Oh no work involved at all. Very nice. Very fun and it gives you a really cool edge the torn edge. Okay so and I'm also going to I'm going to tear this off.