Tag Archives: gluebooking

The Glue Stick Tourist

Posted by melydia on October 28, 2011 None comments

I’ve started another blog, this one devoted to my somewhat unusual hobby of gluebooking my travels. You can find it here: http://gluesticktourist.blogspot.com/

I’m on the “post once a day until I run out of things to post, then have a big lull until I have something new to share” schedule, so there’s a fair bit of stuff up there while I work my way through my existing pile of journals. I thought about just making it another feature here, like on Wednesdays or something, but decided I’d rather make an entirely new blog devoted to just that. I’ve never done a themed blog before (this, despite evidence to the contrary, was never meant to be exclusively a book blog), so it’s a fun experiment. Enjoy!

Intervention Collage

Posted by melydia on September 23, 2011 3 comments

Last weekend, my dear husband and I attended the second annual Intervention, an internet pop culture convention. This was also our second year: we had such a great time in the artists’ alley last year that we had to come back. And we were not disappointed.

While I do make a few of the items we sell (the 8-bit ornaments, mostly, though I designed a few of the buttons as well), most of my job description falls under the heading of Booth Babe. I sit and look pretty and try to get people to buy stuff. And I watch the table when The Artist has a panel or for whatever reason is away from his station. The hours are long and quiet times are inevitable, so I bring things to do, like stuff for gluebook pages I’ve been meaning to catch up on. As I’ve mentioned previously, I often create sort of collage scrapbook things out of tickets, pamphlets, and other detritus picked up while traveling. This time around I was doing a couple pages from a recent excursion to Cumberland, MD, as well as our recent trip to Dragon*Con.

By early evening on Saturday, however, I’d run out of things to do, so I did a walkabout the artists’ alley and picked up all the business cards, flyers, and other free paper matter I could get my hands on, and began glueing all that stuff into my book. Because I was doing this more to pass the time than anything else, I decided I wasn’t going to worry about keeping images with information, so I cut things into smaller and smaller pieces, sticking them wherever they fit, but making a concerted effort to include URLs and contact information for everyone, rather than just hijacking their drawings. I ended up filling fourteen pages. A few of the people I showed it to thought it was nifty, so I’ve scanned in the whole thing for your viewing pleasure.

[Click to embiggen.]

One person suggested I start a blog just about this sort of gluebook souvenir that I make pretty much every time I visit anywhere with a brochure. Granted, I’d be using other people’s art and design to make my art, but on the other hand, I’m actually in physical possession of everything (as opposed to just downloading from the internet), I’m not claiming any of it as mine, and I’m linking back whenever possible. It could be an unconventional (and thus interesting) approach to travel blogging. Then again, it might not interest anybody at all but me. Either way, I’ll continue gluebooking for my own pleasure regardless. The question is whether I should put forth the effort of sharing what I make.

Anyway, I’m waffling. As usual. What do you think?

Recovery Time

Posted by melydia on July 26, 2011 2 comments

As you may know, I try to schedule my blog posts in advance. Today it’s particularly important, since at the moment you are reading this I am probably still unconscious. You see, this morning I had surgery to repair the torn tendons and ligaments in my ankle. It’s been a long time coming, but I believe it’s the right decision. I still couldn’t walk very well – much less jog or hike – after three months. I simply wasn’t getting any better. So here’s to making actual progress.

I did a little art journaling (gluebooking?) over the weekend in anticipation of my upcoming convalescence. I know it’ll be a journey.

I’ve been preparing loads of ways to pass the time stuck in the recliner.

But I know there will be plenty of boredom and impatience.

And drugs. Mustn’t forget drugs.

In short, I don’t know how much I’ll be blogging over the next few weeks. But I’ll be thinking fondly of you all. (As much as I’ll be thinking of much of anything, that is.)

The Japan Journal

Posted by melydia on December 10, 2010 2 comments

In March of this year, my husband and I went on vacation in Japan. I brought a special journal just for the trip, made special from CafePress with art from the first issue of BS/OD on the front. I’m not a huge fan of CP, but this was the only place I could find with decently-priced, customizable, unlined, spiral journals. (But it could be that I’m just too picky.)

Note: I have since discovered the joys of Vistaprint, which often runs free+shipping deals on their custom journals.

Partly it was because I’d never taken a trip like this before and I thought it might be nice to try out travel journaling. Partly it was because I’d heard that many JR and Tokyo Metro stations have unique rubber stamps (like these). Since my regular diary is lined (by necessity – my handwriting is out of control), I decided to get something special just to drag around Japan to record the many experiences we were bound to have.

Train stamps from Osaka

It turns out it came in handy when putting together both my own recap but also my husband’s own blog posts. It’s amazing the amount of stuff you forget unless you write it down that moment.

One of the Sanrio Puroland spreads

But of course a week’s worth of vacation isn’t enough to fill an entire journal, so I glued in a print-out of my recap, then used the rest as a gluebook for the various flyers, brochures, ticket stubs, and other paper matter I collected during the trip. It took a long time. I started by separating everything into categories: Akihabara, Parasite Museum, Sanrio Puroland, capsule machines, Osaka Castle, Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, capsule hotel, Ghibli Museum, transportation, food, and miscellaneous. I went through and cut out all the pictures/words I wanted to include in my pages, then arranged them on the page, then glued them down. I did it one page at a time, keeping the categories together and generally working in chronological order. Whenever I finished a category I would take any leftover clippings and put them in their own container. (Clear plastic sheet protectors work remarkably well for this.) At the end, I did a few miscellaneous pages using the leftovers. I still have quite a few pages left, but I think I’ll leave it alone for now. I’m just so pleased to have finished this somewhat major project – and it only took three months! :)

For more on our trip to Japan, check out my husband’s series of videos: people, Sanrio Puroland, animals, and trains.

Finished!

Cutting and Pasting

Posted by melydia on May 28, 2010 6 comments

For whatever reason, I really enjoy cutting up pieces of paper and gluing them to other pieces of paper. This is the essence of gluebooking. It’s a little bit collage and a little bit art journaling and a lot instant gratification.

Before we go on, I will openly admit that I don’t really understand the difference between art journaling, gluebooking, and scrapbooking. While my husband likes to tease me about my scrapbooking habit, I maintain that as long as I’m not using photographs and word balloons, I’m not technically a scrapbooker. But that’s just semantics. In all of them, you are more or less creatively preserving memories.

I’ve never gotten the hang of keeping a sketch journal. I’m notoriously bad about keeping up with any kind of “daily life” photography, which is probably a related failing. Despite spending so much time drawing, I don’t really think in pictures: I think in words. I’ve kept a regular paper diary since November 1991, yet it is extremely rare that I draw or paste anything in those diaries. I don’t know why, exactly, since those are the things I am most likely to want to look at when I go back through them.

As with many things from my childhood, I first started clipping pictures out of magazines because my older sister did it and I wanted to be just like her. She would re-cover folders, notebooks, and binders with her finds. I pasted stuff into old school notebooks, usually with a big X of Scotch tape across it. I’m not sure when it occured to me just how much tape I was wasting by doing that.

These days I use gluesticks because they are relatively non-messy and don’t yellow with age the way many tapes do. They are perhaps not the most durable of adhesives, but they serve my purposes. (And you can buy them in bulk.) I also don’t go out of my way to find things to cut up anymore, the exception being if I need something for a specific project (like the sketchbook project I’m doing now). Plenty of paper matter ends up in my house, not just from unwanted magazine subscriptions and generous swappers who send ephemera, but also from my weird compulsion to pick up brochures, leaflets, and flyers whenever I come across them. I think it’s related to my overwhelming attraction to free stuff.

The Jem Book

Jem book interior

At the moment I have four books in progress. The first is called the pink camo book, which I will describe at length in a later post. The “Jem book”, a notebook with that iconic cartoon popstar on the cover, is my general, catch-all, “I really should do something with these clippings I’ve collected” gluebook. I received it as a gift because I love both journals and Jem, but with only ten lines per page it didn’t seem very useful as a diary. One of my 101/1001 things is to fill the Jem book. As of this writing I have 33 pages (front and back) left. We’ll see.

Jem book interior

Spiral = good

Two of my other in-progress books are travel journals from my recent trips to Japan and Amsterdam. I designated specific journals just for those trips and they follow the same format: handwritten entries done while I was there, the LiveJournal recap printed out and glued in, and the rest of the pages filled with clippings from brochures from the various places I went. I have absolutely no idea when I will finish these. At the moment I have pasted in the LJ entries for both, and in the Japan journal I’ve completed only two places: the Parasite Museum and Sanrio Puroland. But I think they’ll be fun to look through after they’re done.

Amsterdam journal interior

Japan journal - Sanrio Puroland pages

Do you gluebook? Does it sound crazy? Pointless? Or just like scrapbooking?

utter randomonium