Experimenting with a New Acquisition

Crafty Things gets to play...... For my birthday this year (way back in January - gosh we are already in March!!) I was lucky enough to get some gift vouchers to a lovely little scrapbooking shop. These vouchers enabled me to purchase a .......

BIND IT ALL machine.

Unfortunately for me they were out of the wires that you need to use with the machine. I have had to wait (patiently well maybe not that patiently - I only phoned them a few times to see if the wires had arrived) for the wires to come back into stock. Yippeeeeeee - last week I got a call to say the stock had arrived. Time to play.

I very quickly learnt that there is a little bit of a knack to this gadget. My first attempts didn't end up with beautiful round binding wires but slightly oval shaped, crooked wires. The next big mistake was to start with a wide project that meant I was learning two new things at once. The machine only binds six wires at one time and with a larger project you progressively move the wires along (lining them up oh so carefully.......well lining them up better as you go along!) and bind in sections. Not quite as easy as it looks in the instructions.

Here are my first few attempts. First up a little notebook of recycled paper - tizzied up with lots of ribbon to hide the shonky wire which had a mind of its own.



Next an ideas book - I have made these before and taken them off to be bound with plastic comb binding. The idea came from this blog and I made one for my daughter last year for her to keep track of all her crafting endeavours. I used envelopes for pages, coloured card, thick and thin paper but did not add many inside decorations. The blog I used for my inspiration had beautiful decorations on each page. I did add a few things - I scattered them throughout - to my daughter's book but the latest ones have only got an array of different types of papers for pages. I covered one of the fronts with fabric using fusible webbing and used a piece of double sided scrapbooking paper for the other with a protective plastic layer on top.

Ideas book with fabric cover.

One of the envelope pages.

Plastic protective cover over scrapbooking paper.

My latest experiment was to make another birthday book (Blogged about here). This time I was much more successful with the wire binding and was very happy with the end result. I used my Fiskar's tag punch to label the removable month pages and went with computer printed labels rather than hand lettered. The front cover was again protected with a bit of left over laminate and the back cover was part of a recycled pad backing. The inside pocket pages are cartridge paper and the inserts are index cards.





That is all the play I have had time for but I am thinking about a few other ideas.