STEP ONE: The Template

So my first cheat. Cut a sheet of paper to your final journal size. In my case – 5×7″. Then punch the holes on the Cinch Binding Machine. Scan or photograph it. Then crop it as close to the edges of the paper as possible and place the image in your Illustrator file. Using the Transform panel size the image up to its “real” size – 5×7. Finally, draw your cover rectangle around it and line up your holes to ensure they will fit.

Now if you’re an intelligent human being who can do math you probably don’t need to do what I did above, but I wanted to be sure it would line up perfectly and using this technique allowed me to see that the binding machine causes the top hole to be a tiny bit lower than the rest of them. It also allowed me to figure out the hole size without measuring.

For all the smart math people just take your paper size, add a bit of extra space on the top, bottom, and right sides, and measure the hole distance and size. You can figure it out from there.

STEP TWO: THE ARTWORK

If you can’t/don’t want to draw you can get plenty of awesome free vectors from the internet, or you can just use typography.

 

I’m not going to show you a screenshot of the whole finalized drawing – it’s too easy to live trace it and steal it even with a watermark (sorry, not sorry), but I will show you how I do it. Firstly, I should mention I use a Wacom tablet, and secondly I just use a 3pt calligraphic brush with pressure variation turned on.

 

 

 

Now here is the weird/confusing part. In my design above I want the inner parts of the petals to be cut out so that the paper in the journal can show through. In order to do this I need to be able to select those shapes and color them differently so that I can tell the Glowforge what to do with them. To do this, I drew a large colored rectangle behind my design. Selected everything and hit “DIVIDE” in the pathfinder. This will turn the design into basically a cookie cutter and it will chop up the solid rectangle below it so I can grab and delete the parts I don’t want.

 

And once I have done that I can start colorizing the design to set it up for Glowforge. Anything I want cut I color with an outline, and anything I want engraved I keep it with a fill.

Now what I didn’t really show well here is how I got that nice offset outline for the engrave. Basically, after the divide function (and deleting all the unneeded negative space) I copied all of the artwork to a new area. Fused it all together so it was one solid block and then went to Object> Path>Offset Path.

 

 

 

STEPS 4 & 5: PREP & CUT

 

 

 

STEP 6: CUT THE PAPER, PUNCH THE HOLES

I used a stack cutter to cut the paper, but you can cut it anyway you want. Once you’re ready to punch the holes practice on a few sheets of scrap. The directions on the machine seem a bit odd, but are very sensible once you’ve tried it once or twice.

 

 

 

 

 

STEP 7 & 8: BIND IT

Now we are in the home stretch. Taking a length of 2:1 Pitch coil cut it to length ( use a test page to determine where to cut). Then place it on the “rack” on the right side of the machine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND DONE!

Now you should have a completed journal!

My suggestion is to start with a simpler design – like my nautilus first. The lotus design had many parts and required some good spacial thinking to determine what parts to delete – what to set to outlines, and how to fuse everything together. I know I didn’t explain that part super clear, but that’s why I suggest an easy design to start. Once you get that down, the rest becomes much easier going forward.