Monday, October 24, 2011

Mission Complete: Planner Modification


First off, I apologize for my absence last week, and I feel I should warn you that November is likely to be a rather quiet month.  I'll be participating in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.  The challenge?  To write an entire 50,000-word novel in thirty days.  I was successful last year, and I'm feeling even better about this year.

That's why I didn't post anything last week.  I was busy outlining and planning and writing up character sketches and so on.  I literally could not tear myself away.  I've got everything under control now, though, and I'm trying to relax until November 1st, when all hell is going to break loose.

Of course, I have been doing some crafting.  When I needed a break from outlining, I turned my attention to a simple but fun - and quite useful - little project.

It all started with this nice but somewhat boring planner I had lying around - your typical faux leather binder-type thing.  I  used it off and on for its intended purpose until I ran out of pages.  I  had always intended to print my own refills, but it has since langoured, unused.

Meanwhile, something I've been meaning to put together for some time is some sort of repository for all of my writing ideas.  I wanted something shuffle around and reorganize as necessary, something with pockets for stashing clippings perhaps, something small enough to be easily portable... In short, I wanted a small binder.  Like my planner.  Like the planner that was sitting unused.

Lightbulb.

There was just one problem.  In it's original state, the binder was rather uninspiring...


It didn't even have those pretty gold corners to start with - I just forgot to take a picture before I started experimenting.  The first thing I tried was plain ol' acrylic craft paint.  That's the gold you see here.  I had already decided I wanted to go for a sort of steampunk look, so I painted the main portion a nice, dark brown.  Which looked nice, but dried with a somewhat unpleasant texture.

So I whipped out the Rub-n-Buff - which I'd have used from the start had it occurred to me.  If you're not familiar with this magical substance, you really should be.  It's a metallic wax finish, which comes in a little tube, and works just as the name proclaims.  You squeeze a bit out and rub it onto the surface you want to cover.  Then you can buff it to a nice, muted sheen.  I used Spanish Copper on the bulk of the binder and Antique Gold  for the details.


I gave the inside a similar treatment, though I skipped the initial painting and used the Rub-n-Buff alone.  There isn't much of a visible difference, but I suppose we'll see how things wear.

All in all, I'm quite happy.  I may add a few embellishments, but I think it's already quite an improvement.  Now I just need to work on innards.  I've got some new stamps to play with, so I think I'm going to put them to use on decorating some dividers.  But of course, there'll be more on that later.

In the meantime, I'm off to try and get some housework done before November arrives...

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