Saturday, August 29, 2015

Elmer's Glue: Main Ingredient for Homemade Mod Podge for Gothic-inspired journal covers

One of the finest things that La Simero Handmade was able to showcase to its clients in the Philippines are the following journals sold months ago. These are one of the Gothic-inspired journals made out of mod podging. 

Before I never knew about mod podging. Not until after searching about crafts in YouTube and found out that mod podging is what I have been doing years ago. It is placing texture to crafts through using the Mod Podge and whatever materials you could find at home. 

In my case, I usually use some plies of tissue paper and place it to the cardboard and wet it through my so-called mod podge with a mixture of Elmer's Glue and water. Neither did I know that by having that particular mixture is already a mod podge. Well, the homemade one. 

You can find several ingredients to make your own mod podge. But the basic ingredients are water and a whole bottle of Elmer's Glue. That's it! You already have your own Mod Podge. 

What you can see below are the products of mod podging using my homemade Mod Podge. After that, I colored the entire covers with some poster paints then repeat the the process of placing mod podge to the painted covers. Wait until they dry. 

To achieve the Gothic look, I placed some of the stuff like chains, and some charms I bought from the market. Then, I placed them in the covers through the use of my hot glue gun. Voila! 

To bind the pages, I used Coptic binding stitch to make the pages flat while doing sketching, whatsoever with these journals. 

Thanks to Elmer's Glue, I was able to achieve these good looking, stunningly amazing Gothic-inspired handmade journals! 




Arnold Grummer's Paper Making Process As an Inspiration for La Simero Handmade paper sheets


I have been working with our new branding for our handmade journals here in the Philippines. Through the help of several media such as Pinterest, Etsy, and other crafty blogs available, I was able to establish my own crafty stuff by doing something creative out of the things available at home.

One of the newest things I did is making our handmade paper taken from Arnold Grummer's paper making techniques as an inspiration. Several weeks ago, I saw his videos about how easy it is to make new sheets of paper from recycled scraps of paper and other materials to blend in to the new sheets. You may click on the video below to see yourself how Arnold Grummer recycled papers to make new sheets of papers. 


Based from the video, I have innovated some of his techniques from what is really available at home.


Above are some of the products made from the trimmed handmade paper sheets. These are made from scrap papers blended together with some botanical like dried flowers, leaves, and so on depending on the available resources.

These handmade bookmarks with cute felt designs came from 12 x 12 inches handmade paper that you can see in my Etsy shop listing through this link attached.

12 x 12 in La Simero Handmade paper sheets
Regular sized handmade, recycled paper sheets - Etsy listing

If you have more suggestions for DIY, crafts to make out of recycled and handmade papers like the ones posted, you may leave your comments below.