Make Your Own Ideabook with Arne & Carlos: Create Handmade Art Journals and Bound Keepsakes to Store Inspiration and Memories

Review “This highly graphic, exciting guide has enough variety with simple technique to match any interest. It will appeal to budding artists and seasoned crafters alike.”— Library Journal “These handmade smash books are glorious. … Make Your Own Ideabook is so fun and inspiring, and will make you want to make your own books and fill them with all sorts of great stuff.”— CraftGossip.com “It’s one thing to make a handmade book, but it’s another to fill it. Make Your Own Ideabook with Arne & Carlos has fantastic ideas and techniques for both!”— Cloth, Paper, Scissors About the Author Arne Nerjordet and Carlos Zachrison launched their Arne & Carlos knitwear line in 2007, gaining notice with their witty reworkings of classic Scandinavian motifs—for example, intricately patterned sweaters festooned with space invaders rather than reindeer. Their brand hit big when Rei Kawakubo of cult fashion house Commes des Gar?on commissioned a mini collection in 2008, followed by a line of garments for US-based Urban Outfitters in 2009, as well as Dale of Norway. Arne & Carlos were motivated to empower others to recreate their fabulous designs, so they have backburnered their ready-to-wear lines and instead travel internationally, teaching knitting classes and promoting their five books, which show knitting-lovers how to recreate Arne & Carlos’ unique knitwear patterns with step-by-step instructions. Their books are now published in fourteen languages and have sold almost half-a-million copies worldwide. Arne & Carlos have starred in features in numerous online and print publications, as well as appeared on television morning and talk shows in Scandinavia and Europe. They are charming, personable, quirky, and sophisticated—superb conversationalists and the utmost professionals.They are the authors of the international best-selling books 55 Christmas Balls to Knit ; Easter Knits ; Knitted Dolls ; Knit-and-Crochet Garden , Norwegian Knits with a Twist and 30 Slippers to Knit and Felt also available from Trafalgar Square Books. Their creative base is in the Valdres region of Norway, north of Oslo. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. FOREWORDIt’s all about the joy of owning one book or several, and how nice it is to leaf through all types of paper, sewn together by you and for you. This book shows you how to make and use your own homemade ideabooks.We’ve heard about the “paperless society,” but we think paper is no less important now than it ever was. There are beautiful books and magazines that are all about the paper. Paper continues to make people happy. Reading with a tablet or computer can’t compare to the feeling of owning and holding a book. Every home should have some bookshelves—and some books to put on them.You can collect your thoughts, recipes for cooking, inspiration for handcrafts, notes, secrets, and pictures in your own hand-made ideabooks. You can glue in tickets and cuttings from tours you’ve been on, holidays you’ve taken, places you’ve visited. Make your own notebooks nice and thick with soft and ragged edges, and fill them with ideas and memories. Glue and repair spines and cracks between the pages, because you’ll want to put in everything—and that can be a little hard on a book. And what do we mean by “ideabook”? A book you’ve made yourself can hold anything you want! It could, for example, be a memory book, a planning book, a renovations book, or perhaps a gardening book. Well-worn books are like old people—they are lovelier because they’ve lived a life with good memories!Most people who work creatively have one or more such books. Some are satisfied with a loose-leaf system. They place page after page in a ring binder or preserve the papers in folders; others collect their papers in plastic document folders or glue their chosen memories in sketch books. We’ve sewn and created our own ideabooks for many years, and used these books to document all aspects of our creative lives.To look into our ideabooks is the nearest one can come to looking into the creative right sides of our brains. We welcome you in! Read more