one of the reasons i love CHA is that every time i go i find something that makes me squeal out loud in excitement. sometimes it it the damnedest things too.
in past years it has been anything from anatomically correct looking hand drills to fabric die cutting machines.
this year it was the unibind.
so simple to use, so quick to bind! basically you plug it in, fill the covers with whatever pages you want and set it in the machine for 90 seconds and you have a perfect bound book!
really i am not kidding! the covers have a resin in the spine that when the spine is heated by the machine the resin permanently bonds the pages in the book. and get this...if you want to add or remove pages down the road, just heat it up again, take the book off while it is hot and remove or add the pages!
the pages can withstand up to 80 pound of pressure! at least that is what the lady at the booth at CHA said. bill and i tested it out and were quite convinced!
their whole sales pitch for the unibind is that you can digitally print your pages and then easily create your own photobooks like shutterfly and the like.
blah, blah, blah...yeah yeah i know that is cool too, but that sells it totally short!
my first question to them was..."can you bind canvas in it?"
now, shut your eyes and imagine the look on the lady's face when i asked her this. she had only patterned paper, photo pages, photos, but nothing fun!
i could not wait to finally get them in the shop to PLAY and when they came in last week i put one aside just for me!
one of my favorite things about the photobooks is that they are plain. a
virtual blank canvas primed and ready for altering. even as i stood at
the booth at CHA, i envisioned making this book.
the first thing i did was heat emboss the cover with clear UTEE (Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel) and my purely entwined stamp.
the clear UTEE creates a resist.
i then painted a water downed layer of Golden cobalt teal fluid acrylic over the embossed cover. once the paint dries you can use a baby wipe, rub over the embossed areas and the paint rubs away.
i added ALL KINDS of fun pages...sheets of cardstock, vintage papers, manila tags, 6x6 canvas refill page, fabric tags, envelopes, vellum's, index dividers & vintage flash card. the website states the 9mm photobook that i used can hold 24-35 sheets of photo or presentation paper or 75 sheets of copy paper. 
i am pretty sure i didn't even begin push the binding to its limit with what i added, but i know i like to create thick pages in my books and i wanted to leave some room
then i pushed everything as far as it could go down into the spine, placed it on the photobook creator read some emails and 90 seconds later i had a perfect bound book!
it is flippin' awesome!
(god when i think of the hell i went through with that zutter contraption, oy vey!)
i don't even want to stop and work in it, i just want to keep making more books!!
this one i created using the 8x8 photobook, but i have a 4x6 photobook sitting here next to me just itching to be filled with blank pages of canvas and such.
imagine how easy it will be to make photo albums in multiple for the holidays...portfolio samples...magazine pages i have ripped out for ideas...kids schoolwork/artwork...holy hell i need to go write all these ideas down in my journal because my head is spinning!
