Pocket notebook play

 Yes, I am momentarily obsessing about making product for the markets in Scotland. Apologies.

As I have looked this way and that at what I could do, I started out thinking about postcards, with some words I had written.

Of course they were a bit to the side - words about fences; words about telegraph poles. I thought I might letterpress the words onto a faint image of fences or say telegraph poles.

And then I thought, seriously, who would want to buy words about fences?!?! Or telegraph poles?!?!

I had done some lovely play with the images though, and down in the studio it seemed to me that they might become covers for notebooks, somehow.

I had to remind myself that when I make notebooks with blank pages in them (which is what I normally do), they never sell because folk are frightened by blank pages. So maybe not such a great idea.

But then I went off to work out if I could print lined pages on the computer, and if so, could I do them on slightly nicer paper?

And I could, and we had some sort of lift off.

Here are a couple of images printed to A5 size on Fabriano Unica paper on the computer. Fences!

And then when I folded them down to be notebook covers, they became these.

Which I really liked. I liked the wrap around nature of them, and I liked the way I had knocked back the colour so much.

I continued to look for, and modify photos that I thought might work.

The trick is always if they work as folded covers, which most do. The ones with the big expanses of sky tend to pick up some stray printer marks/lines which probably means they won't make the final cut. And the spider web one just looks wrong.

Along the way I also played with ones I had stuffed up.  Mostly using the wrong paper - for covers and for the  inside pages. One learns as one goes along.

The paper inside this sweet wee one was so thick the poor book just stays wide open...

But they definitely have potential.

All the pages have been cut and trimmed...now the job is to pierce the holes and sew them!