Monday, May 17, 2010

Love Letters Straight From My Heart

This is the first of two postcard books I'm making for one of my Etsy customer. It's inspired by the look of old love letters, complete with red ribbon tying them all together. The paper on the back is lightly antiqued, then covered with my writing. I was at a loss what to do for the cover for some time, and finally settled on some older, darker antiqued paper I had lying around. I then made a quick lino stamp of vertical lines and made a pattern around the outside so that it looks like an old air mail envelope. I decided it needed plenty of ribbon, so I doubled up the front ties. Should come in useful as the back paper is awfully springy! I'm pressing it now to get it to behave.

I really like making these postcard books because I love things that show off so well when they're done. I'd forgotten what dimensions I made the original book, but fortunately I remembered to check if the postcards fit before I cut everything too small!

Here's a close-up of the paper I made for the back. I copied a few of Shakespeare's sonnet's for the 'letter.' I love this scarlet ink. It's the same I used for the Tell-Tale Heart.

If you're interested in how this all gets put together, here's a progress shot. This is the inside of the book. The red paper is what I'll be using for The Tell-Tale Heart. It works great here because of the rich colour and vintage type look. That gets all folded, then the triangles get folded (and the writing is all going the same way, I made doubly sure nothing was upside down!) and the back tabs glued. You can see that they're sticking out, so I sewed the middle down on each one, which is why the postcards stay so securely in their little tabs. After this I backed this with more of the outside letter paper so that it looked all nice and neat, and attached the cover.

No comments:

Post a Comment