Not quite right

I worked on a handmade journal for about three days, just experimenting.
I found out quite a few things doing this:

1) If you use corrugated cardboard for a cover it needs to be reinforced.

This is reinforced with washi tape and is made from corrugated cardboard with the "lines" going up and down on one sheet and side to side on the other. They were glued together with Elmer's glue but I think double sided tape would have been better.

2) Elmers glue bonds paper based stuff really well.
3) There are certain materials and places where double stick tape is probably better than glue
4) This is really important. Pay attention when placing pages in the journal. Quite a few of mine had images visible under the paint and after I sewed it I realized they were upside down.

This is one of the pages. Even though the photo shows the image as bein horizontal, in the journal the right side of the page is the top and the left side is the bottom.

One of my painted pages. Love these colors. This is a catalog page with poster paint.

Vellum sheet and graph paper under it (two separate pages).

My first attempt at a decorated paper clip. I used the paper from some embroidery floss and glued it to the paper clip.

Pocket page

On the inside of the front cover I used a paper towel. I gives a kind of padded feel and the towel has a lot of texture.

The main reason I did this journal was to practice the Japanese 3-hole binding method ( not the exact name). You can see this in the first photo. This particualr method is good for binding loose pages as opposed to binding signatures. I think it works best with some type of hinged binding. I will be working on improving my binding and cover creation, but it was a good lesson. I will be using this journal to work out techniques to use in other journals, not that I plan on making a lot, but I do have some papers I need to use up.