This week Paul and I went to Reverse Art Truck in Ringwood. As always, we went there looking for one thing and didn’t find it, but came away with lots of other goodies:

I got some fabric samples, a book of wallpaper samples, and mount board cut outs from a framing shop. Most of these are for bookbinding projects. The mount board cut outs make great book cover card. The fabric would make great bookcloth, though I picked up the two samplers on the right and the two grey swatches at the top for possible sewing projects.

The wallpaper sampler has lots of potential. The wallpaper isn’t coated in glue, and could be useful as both the pages or cover of books. It could even be used to make greeting cards or gift tags.

Some is subtle.

Some is bolder.

Some has interesting patterning, like this one, which has marks like water droplets on watercolour paper. But the paper isn’t the only part that I can use. The book itself has potential.

Once the wallpaper sample pages are removed, there’ll be a handful of divider pages left. I’ll cut them off, leaving a strip, and onto that strip I’ll attach new pages. I’ll use heavy watercolour paper, or a thick card. It’ll either be a sketchbook, a photo album, or both.

As always, there was something that I nearly bought, but didn’t, then regretted it later. So the next day I went back and got it.

I keep seeing amazing work by sketchbook artists done with black and white pens on brown paper. It seemed a bit excessive to buy a whole roll of brown paper just to try this out, but heck, it was only $8. I also found some sheets of thin white plastic, which will be great to stick between pages to protect them from glue as it’s drying, or protect my table.