a night at the movies

Well, we're back from Maine, jettisoned forcefully and somewhat brutally back into the relative frantic-ness of summertime life.

As wonderful as our vacation was, I was itching to play with the new craft materials waiting on my table at home. It's actually quite nice not having the money to do "exciting" things on vacation... It's one of those simple, lovely pleasures to be able to just do what you normally do day to day (except go to work, of course - but that's the best part!) but in a different, beautiful setting. So all week I was keeping up with all my normal blogs in my beloved Google Reader, glancing occasionally over the top of my computer at the sparkling cove.

One of the items in my Reader feed was a post by the lovely and inspiring Lisa Spangler. She did a wonderful tutorial for the Hero Arts blog on how to do Japanese bookbinding on a mini-book for keeping cookie fortunes. (You can see the original post here.) She did a fantastic video, which I watched, starred to maybe do something with later, and then kind of forgot about.

On Friday, we went to the movies in Brunswick to see Inception. It was AMAZING and you MUST see it NOW, if you haven't already. But afterwards I thought of Lisa's book, and how fantastic it would be to save movie ticket stubs. After DH and I got the office cleaned up this afternoon (it had been the house's dumping-ground for a few days before vacation), I dumped out my new SC kit and, in the same frantic manner that my mind has been going in since we got back last night, standing at my paper cutter, I whipped up a quick cover for my movie ticket book. Then I popped the tv on, punched some holes, and did the play-pause dance with Lisa's video while I sewed the biding.

My pages are more utilitarian and much less adorable than Lisa's (mostly because of her use of fabulously fun washi tape), but I really wanted to put the first page together so I just used what I could find.

I used this stamp set from We R Memory Keeper's Old Glory collection (I love these little $1 stamps and more and more manufacturers are making them these days!) to do the rating stars. You can see on the photo above that they came out a little wonky when I tried to stamp the 5th star; I didn't leave myself quite enough room and so I had to stamp the stars on a little bit of an angle. It kind of bugs me, but it's ok. And I colored in the stars with a coordinating dark blue Mr. Sketch smelly marker (hee hee!)... Doesn't matter that it's not an acid-free marker because neither is the ticket stub and this book isn't likely to gain family-heirloom status.

You've gotta make this project - It's SO fun! And to help you out, I've got the video for you right here! :)



Thanks to Lisa for the great inspiration, and thanks to you for stopping by!