DIY Mini Pen Tutorial

I carry a pen with me wherever I go, and because I hate rummaging in my ever-deepening purse for a pen, I prefer to keep one in my pocket. This is great until you sit down and get stabbed in the thigh by a pen. Mini pens are great because this never happens. They’re exactly the right size to fit horizontally in your pocket, but companies seem to think they can charge a premium for half a pen (kinda like buying lingerie).  This is where DIY comes in.  I figured out a way to take your basic Bic Clic Stic pens and make your own mini pens.

1. First, buy yourself a twelve-pack of Bic Clic Stic Retractable Ball Pens (I’ve done the shopping for you–it’s the best deal I could find–if you find a better one, please let me know).
2. Second, wiggle the click part off the pen–this is easiest to achieve by twisting.
3. Third, score a line all the way around the pen with an X-ACTO Knife at the period after med.
4. Snap the pen.  The plastic is pretty brittle and easy to snap, and it should break at the line you scored.
5. Sand a bit of the jaggedness away so it looks nice and purty.
6. Cut the same amount off the ink well. I.e., if you cut off an inch and a quarter of the barrel, cut an inch and a quarter off the ink well.  It’s nice to do this to pens you’ve been using for a while so you don’t waste any ink, and also so you don’t get ink on your hands when you cut the ink well.
7. Stick the clicker back in.  THIS IS HARD, unless you do like I do and shave a little of the plastic off of the clicker with your blade.  The middle of the barrel is slightly narrower than the end, so shaving a TINY bit of plastic off makes it much easier to stick the clicker back in.
8. Voila!  A perfectly sized pen to match a pocket-sized notebook.

Take a Stitch Tuesday 2012 Challenge

I’m joining the Take a Stitch Tuesday (TAST) challenge where every Tuesday a new embroidery stitch is posted and you’re encouraged to experiment with it.  I’m really excited; hopefully I’ll be able to keep up!  I love embroidery (although I have yet to post any of it online . . . ), and I think this will be a good way to expand my horizons and stretch my designs.

Coded Letterpress Calendar

I had some ideas I was bouncing around for letterpress calendars and I came up with some beautiful designs–and then I found out it would cost at least $240 for the polymer plates to print them.  Way out of my price range, especially considering how unlikely it would that I could sell any of them, let alone enough to recover the cost of printing them.  So . . . I used hand-set type!  I modified my designs to something very simple and modern.  Kind of crazy setting all those little numbers for the calendar, and I had to limit the number of calendars I printed to 15 because there wasn’t enough type to set all of the calendars at once–I could only do one at a time.  Thankfully, working the last year and a half at the Center for Book Arts sorting galleys and galleys of type once a week has made me very fast.  I sold several at the Center’s Holiday Fair this past Saturday, but I still have a few left so I’ve listed them in my Etsy shop.

The names of the months are hidden within the quirky little phrases I came up with.

Scandinavian Folk Art Block Print Ornaments

I’ve recently become obsessed with Scandinavian folk art, and something about it just screams CHRISTMAS to me.  I’ve been experimenting with linoleum block printing on the Vandercook lately, so I decided to do a set of Scandinavian folk art inspired ornaments (available in my Etsy shop).  I drew my inspiration from Scandinavian Stitches: 21 Playful Projects with Seasonal Flair and Scandinavian Needlecraft: 35 Step-by-step Projects to Create the Scandinavian Home.  Of course, I had to have a Dala horse and a bird, and to that I added a tree, heart, star, and snowflake.  They’re printed on nice, toothy paper that doesn’t take large blocks of ink very well, so it took a bit of trial and error to get the color coverage I wanted.  It’s amazing what soaking the paper and adding ink extender will do to improve how the paper takes the ink.

I had neither space nor money for a real Christmas tree this year, so I crocheted a little garland and taped it to the wall with double-sided tape and strips of Christmasy paper.  What do you think? Ghetto, or nicely minimal?

Hand of the Sower

One of my favorite stories from the Bible is the Parable of the Sower. The variables in the parable have always fascinated me: the soil, the rocks, the birds, the thorns, the seed. But recently what has been on my mind has been the sower himself.

Hand of the Sower

All that Man Creates

Front Cover

Book block

Back cover

My first completed “artist book,” as opposed to the blank books I normally bind. The paper, which I made myself, is 100% recycled junk mail. Some of the pages are thin and cobwebby, some normal, and some quite thick and textured with the cover being the thickest and bumpiest of all.
I did use a scrap of Japanese rice paper to laminate to the cover since it didn’t take to folding very well.

Beehive II

I gave up on linoleum for this–it just wouldn’t cooperate–I used a Staedtler Mastercarve block instead, which indeed does “cut like butter,” and my Speedball Linoleum Cutter Assortment.  You could also use Speedball Speedy-Carve Block, which I’ve used on other projects to equally great effect.

The carved rubber stamp

I got the really fine lines I wanted, but the downside is I can’t print it with a press. I haven’t been able to get the coverage I want in my proofs since I have to use craft stamp pads. My printing inks require more pressure than the carving block can handle.

Printed with stamping ink

I did give it a go with embossing powder, and the effect is much mire to my liking.

Printed with embossing powder

Beehive Linocut

I’m working on an artist book on the current plight of bees, and I wanted a linocut of a decaying beehive for the cover. I did this sketch, starting in the lower left corner, but I didn’t like the lines so I changed it for the rest. I’m not sure how successful I’ll be at achieving these delicate lines in linoleum since it likes to crumble when you put too fine a point on things, but I’m up for the adventure.

Peacock Linocut

Growing up on a small farm, the meowing from the muster of peacocks down the road might have been annoying or even downright creepy. But it never bothered me, and now I think about it with nostalgia. I wanted to do something with that feeling, so I decided to make a linocut of a peacock. The first sketch I did (below) was okay, but I didn’t love it.

Peacock and some feathers

After getting some feedback from my best friend the artist, I changed the composition to be more self-contained, changed the very geometric tail feathers to something more organic, and made the small hidden bird within the body of the larger bird less hidden, and this is what I came up with:

Now this, I love.

This was just the sketch. I’m cutting the linoblock now, and I’ll post the results when I’m done. The plan is to use the print as the cover for a book because that’s just what I do.

Long Stitch Binding, Suede Cover

I love books with wraparound covers made of unfinished leather, so when I saw a scrap of suede in a bin at a fabric store in Jamaica for only a couple dollars, I snapped it up.  It took me a while to figure out how to use it because suede isn’t strong enough to hold a book together.  I decided to do a long stitch binding with soft covers, because then the suede doesn’t see as much abuse as if it were holding cover boards onto the book block.