Remnant Daybook; A Record of the Journey

Bill and I are heading off for a relaxing stroll-about in Quebec City this week, where we'll stay at the Auberge J.A. Moisan, a B&B touted as the oldest continually-operating food store in North America. A little gourmet breakfast, a little sampling of old world wares and lilting French wafting through the air. The new camera will be there to capture the essence. We'll wend our way down through Niagara Falls so we can spend some time contemplating our insignificance before heading back to real life. I have some moleskine's packed, but wanted to bring something else for jotting down reflections on the journey.

I'm a fan of Mary Ann Moss's "Remains of the Day" style journal which has started a stitching revolution, so I modded my own version to make this remnant daybook. I started with some pieces of watercolor paper that were sized to the old book cover I wanted to use. "Police Records : their installation and use" ala 1940's--how does a book like this end up in the antique mall? I washed the papers with watercolor and let them dry. Then I sat down at the sewing machine and started stitching on bits and bobs of unfinished projects, photocopies, book pages and a little ephemera. After this was stitched together, I went through with more watercolor and pastel to juice it up.

The binding was accomplished by cutting some strips of fabric about an inch wide and the length of the book, then stitching a page to each side of the strip. When I had as many as I wanted, I stacked them in sets of three and stitched down the middle to attach them in signatures to a wider strip of canvas which served as my binding cloth. This was then sewn into the spine of the old book and reinforced with glued fabric strips. The pages lay perfectly flat and open when writing and it's got plenty of room for notes, thoughts and stuff we pick up along the way! Bon voyage and watch facebook for twitter updates.