Geek Craft: Mario Journal
This week's Geek Craft: a handbound journal with multi-coloured pages and a corduroy cover. What's so geeky about that, you might ask? This journal has Nintendo's Mario gracing the front cover! It was made with an old hardcover book, recycled and recovered with corduroy fabric, and Mario was painstakingly handstitched with felt - each pixel being represented by a tiny felt square. To learn the art of handbinding books, it would be a great idea to check out the Book Binding tutorials by CraftyCrafty's own, Kim Lawler.
This basis of this book was created with an old hardcover book. I ripped the old pages out of the book, and handbound some new pages for the inside. I chose to use several different colours of paper to brighten up the book. To create the cover, I covered the front cover with brown corduroy fabric. Before gluing the fabric down to the hardcover book, I stitched on the geeky Mario image on the front. I used red, brown, blue, light peach, and yellow felt and used a picture of Mario from his 8-bit days as a guide. Each square of felt represents a pixel and each square is sewed to the corduroy with matching embroidery thread.
Once you're done sewing the felt on, you can attach the fabric cover to the hardcover book itself. Since the corduroy is a heavy fabric, I just used contact cement to secure the fabric to the hardcover book. And you're done! Now you have a great book to write down all of your video game cheat codes or just something to write in when you're not playing your Nintendo.
