Good news – my self-published paperback journals arrived and they look great!

Mould making, like home baking

One of the things I had to do immediately when I poured my new silicone mould was to figure out how to actually pour liquid metal into it without ending up covered in liquid metal. It’s a pretty important thing to work out.

Beforehand, I used to rely on clamps, straps, screws or bungee cords, but now I have a system – a springform cake tin.

Yes friends, it works. I made the original mould in a biscuit tin (there’s a clear food trend here, I know) but I was forced to cut the tin away to de-mould it. So with that gone, I had to use some DIY acetoxy cure silicone to bulk up the high temperature silicone mould and keep it rigid inside the springform tin.

If you’re going to do this, remember that you have to make the DIY silicone second. You can’t pour this high temperature silicone into or onto an existing acetoxy cure silicone form, because the acetoxy cure silicone will stop the high temperature silicone from curing properly.

So far I’ve been experimenting with vents and gates, and pouring inclines – trying things out to see what I can get away with, and which methods give which results… all to figure out how to control the process as much as possible.

I need a hotplate…

Last week I coated my kitchen with wax and this week I’m back to melting pewter. I really need to get a tiny stovetop to live in my studio, but I don’t know if an electric hotplate ring will do the job for heating pewter.

It’s so easy to adjust the melting process with a gas flame – I don’t know if an electric ring can do as good a job with my wonky pound-shop bought pots that probably don’t have flat bottoms any more.

Is that going to be my next purchase? Maybe, maybe not – let’s see if I get evicted from the kitchen by the end of next week.

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Although I’m still pushing to get my second journal finished, I do feel as though it’s been a productive creative week. The written content for the journal turned out to need a lot of research and updating, and the formatting had to be totally different from the first one, so it couldn’t be rushed.

Hopefully next week I’ll have finished the interior and I’ll be ready to move on with it.

Finger knitting…

As a nice, distracting aside, I learned how to finger knit this week.

Am I actually going to get around to using this new skill any time soon? Hey, who knows – I just like the potential recycling/upcycling applications.

Creating a new coin model

Thanks to my new cutting machine, it’s been much easier to re-create my coin for moulding, and it looks even better this time around. Out of disaster came improvement, so I’m quite happy about that.

My next step is to give it the final touches and use the high-temperature silicone I bought in April to make a mould of it.

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My Brother Scan N Cut machine arrived this week, and after a slightly tense first day of banging my head against a wall of new software and unheard of file types, I think I’ve cracked it.

I mean, I can’t believe I’d never heard of these types of machines before!

My brain is fizzing with thoughts of all of the things I can make. In fact, I was able to start a new coin prototype without wearing out my hands, and this one is much better than the one I lost.

What swung it for me when deciding on a Scan N Cut was the fact that I could scan in my own drawings. I have no interest whatsoever in replicating someone else’s designs, so being more able to use my own spontaneous freehand drawings was a big deal for me.

Navigating between art and craft

One of the things that interests me is how these cutter plotter machines are marketed. There are no-frills vinyl cutters that are priced for industry, and then there are machines pitched squarely at mostly female crafters, with lots of soft lines, pastel colours, flowery decoration and cutesy names.

These home maker machines have a lot of potential for all sorts of really ambitious construction projects, but you’d think they were only for cardmaking or scrapbooking.

Sometimes the biggest difference between art and craft is simply purpose – you could argue that originality and derivativeness play a part, but then that would eliminate the Jeff Koonses and Koons-lites… so purpose and intent seem to play a huge part.

Designing my second journal is taking longer than I thought…

I’d wanted to be able to produce a second journal within a week – ambitious, I know, but potentially feasible. The problem was that I chose a topic that required a bit more research, whereas my first journal was based on an article with lots of ready-made questions.

These aren’t just blank notebooks – the prompts and questions have to be relevant and thorough.

Besides that, I had to revisit the cover design for the first book and revamp it as I wasn’t totally happy with the print. That took about a day’s work.

Naturally, that means recreating the book mockups, which will eat up a chunk of another day… ah well. It’s still been a great week for getting stuff done – the ball has definitely started rolling again!

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Last week I was feeling deflated and couldn’t get my head around going back to work on my sculpture. I couldn’t decide on the right equipment to buy either, so it felt as though I was spinning my wheels.

Just this minute I’ve settled on – and bought – a Brother Scan N Cut – so the design and construction process can resume once it arrives!

KDP self-publishing

In the meantime I had one good idea – ditch everything for a while and do something totally different. So with a couple of days’ worth of concentrated effort, I produced and published my first guided journal.

I’ve published e-books before – just cleaned up academic essays – but never tried publishing a paperback myself.

A few months ago I had taken out a 2-month Skillshare trial and came across a course on publishing low/no content books. Because of my longstanding (and long deferred) interest in writing a graphic novel, I played the videos in the background whilst cleaning up the studio and had a lightbulb moment.

The AHA! bit was that I could definitely create journals that I’d be proud of – and I have a mad love for notebooks, so two birds with the single rock, right?

The bleurgh bit was knowing that I had too many ideas on the go at once, so it sat on the back burner. That is, until last week when I decided to re-watch the Skillshare videos and do it straight away.

Designing and publishing

I didn’t create a blank book – it was more of a guided notebook based on a popular article I’d written on my finance blog.

So with a relatively high content level, I just had to design the page spreads, format and lay out the text, design the cover illustrations, export them all in the right formats and upload.

I say, “just” had to do all that – ok, it was a solid block of work, but the foundation’s been laid for at least four more notebooks based on my existing articles.

If you want to have a go at creating journals yourself, here are the resources I used:

• DesignCuts for illustration packages. They have freebies every Friday that you can use in commercial projects.
• Creative Market for fonts. They have free goods every Monday, including fonts.
• RawPixel for stock imagery. You can get a free trial (and use the photos you download after your trial ends).

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