Three Ring Binder - Part I

Many years ago I did a lot of community theatre.  A lot.  Throughout those years I had always wanted to create a scrapbook of sorts that had all of the playbills from all of the shows I took part.  During this time I came across a sale of a three ring binder leather craft kit.  I snapped that up and started to make my plans to tool that cover and get it ready for all the playbills.  It was never to be.  Every time I sat down with the cover to work up a design I would come up blank.  (This was mostly due to my attempt at keeping the theme within theatre.)  It had never occurred to me to try something else instead of a theatre theme.  So eventually I just stuck it with my leather stuff and worked on other projects.  When it came time to open our shop on Etsy last year, I had every intention of putting something on that notebook and selling it.  But I kept forgetting that I had it.  Not to mention I did not have all the right tools to complete the project to my liking.

Fast forward to this year.  We reopened the shop and I finally picked up the cover and started to think seriously about what I would design.  Now that I had broadened my horizons beyond just a theatrical design inspiration came pretty quickly.  Recently I have seen a lot of "tree of life" imagery and decided I wanted to incorporate that into the design.  While looking over the internet for the right tree to stand in for my tree of life I remembered that one of my favorite shows, Carnivale, incorporated a tree into it's symbolism.  In actuality the tree in Carnivale is the "Tree of Usher" and is the location of the final showdown between good and evil.  (At least it was for the climax of season 2 before the show got canned.  Damn HBO.)  Anyway I drew up a design of the tree that I really liked.  The problem was I have a lot of real estate to cover with this notebook.  The tree would take up about half of the front and that is all so I had to have some more.  I briefly thought to have "Management: KEEP OUT" underneath the tree, which fans of the show would have appreciated, but I decided against it.  For another time then.  But the show did feature tarot cards as a fairly large part of the plot. So I found a sun and moon and have incorporated them into the design.

As you can see the tree is on the front with the sun above it while the moon is on the back.  Both the front and back are surrounded by an arch.  I really like this design for many reasons.  It hints at a favorite show of mine while appealing to much larger audience.  I keep the design simple in that I only cut using my swivel knife and then I beveled with my small bevel tool to get into the small creases of the tree.  (I used my large bevel tool for the arch that surrounded the front and the back.  It made the job quicker.)  After I finished beveling I did some decorative cuts and that was all she wrote.  Now this is ready to stain and stitch.  

As you can see the piece does not have pre-punched holes around the edges.  The next entry I will go over how I did that and how I put the whole thing together.  

Until then, Happy Crafting!