Page Layout and Other Natter

Long Weekend of Page Layout and Other Natter

I took a snow day last Friday, and had Monday off (Lincoln’s Birthday), so I got a fair amount done on the floodplain manager’s conference book. Last Friday evening I sent out a draft that has “Joanna Goanna” and “Tanami Womapython” as plenary/luncheon speakers, with pictures and text. I’ve gotten replies from 3 or 4 people . . . and no comments on Joanna and Tanami. I’m not sure if people didn’t actually look at those bits, or if they figured that those are bits to be edited. 

Last night I packed up the two tiny booklets I’d made, as an Etsy customer bought them. Apparently thew weren’t too silly or expensive, and I should make a couple/few more.

Today I got an order for two pairs of “deluxe” black skirt hikes (fancy dee rings), and discovered that I had zero pairs. Carp carp carp. Fortunately, I have enough dees to make more, and the hard part turned out to be finding the plain 1” dees. At least those I could have gone to Tandy for in the morning. I got the two pairs made, and strips cut for more, plus some in brown and small brown plain skirt hikes. The order is packed and ready to go out to the mail box in the morning. I’ll mark, punch, and assemble the rest tomorrow.

Bedtime now.  

A Little This, A Little That

I’ve talked to the chair for this year’s floodplain manager’s conference, determined that I do have a set of information I thought I needed, and have given him a timeline for the conference program book.

I received the fabric.com sports team fabric order, and placed a second order with JoAnn.com, as some team fabric was on sale yesterday, and the website was showing 2 yards of Northwestern fabric available. So I tried for that, plus Purdue and Western Michigan University (Purdue and WMU being family alma maters). Also received my corrugated plastic signboard sheets for backing fabric with paper, and said paper. 

Yesterday I cut out the covers, linings, and endsheets for some more booklets for sale. I wanted to do more on them, but decided not to push my luck in terms of aggravating my back. 

I also discovered that I’m out of dark brown bookcloth. One of the booklets I was working on needs a dark brown spine to use the two pieces of paper that make up the cover. If I’d realized I was out I’d have ordered more when I ordered the paper for backing fabric, but I didn’t so I didn’t and there we are. IIRC Dick Blick usually has dark brown, and is not too far out of the way to stop on the way home from work . . . when traffic isn’t crawling due to snow.

Virtual Progress

Not a lot has happened the last couple nights in the way of work on books. Last night I pulled the trio of covers I wet down and put in the press to dry and flatten out. They came out nice and flat. Sadly, they didn’t stay that way. 

Wednesday I ordered a bunch of sports team fabrics to make book covers out of from JoAnn.com, along with paper to back it with, and corrugated plastic sheets to do said backing on. Unfortunately, JoAnn turned out to be out of about half the fabrics, so Thursday I placed an order at fabric.com for most of the ones I couldn’t get from JoAnn.  And after a discussion with Xap about the Fremd spring craft show being at about the start of baseball season, the order included several pro baseball team fabrics. Ron suggested I make a book that has Cubs fabric on one side, Sox on the other, and Cardinals on the spine. Ultimate rivalry bait! I may just do that, especially since I had to order 2 or 3 yards of each of the baseball team fabrics. 

I’m thinking that it’s about time to renew the attack on the dining room, since pretty much all Ron’s truck stuff is back out of it (came home between Roehl and Schneider). It would be really nice to be able to use my drafting table again. Especially for, say, cutting down pieces of paper and fabric for bookbinding projects, since it has a nice big cutting mat buried under all the stuff piled on it. 

Given Ron and Robin’s schedules, which is home only a day or so a week, and that Robin has definitely become a nocturnal beast, the dining room going to take a while. I probably could do most of it myself, but that would take even longer yet. The goal for this weekend is to get input on my proposed room layout, which I e-mailed to them on Tuesday. The room layout question involves getting rid of some shelving and replacing it with The Grinch and some smaller shelving, which is part of what I need their sanity-checking on.