Egyptian Brew Journal

In addition to making books, I also enjoy spending some of my free time brewing beer. It's a hobby I've only recently picked up, and when learning something new, I've always found it handy to keep detailed notes on what I'm doing. I've also been developing my baking skills, which I also want to take notes on. So I got the idea to make a brewing and baking journal.

But what to put on it, and what to make it out of? The Egyptians may not have been the first to brew beer, but they were the biggest brewers of the ancient world. Wages were paid in bread and beer--the original two great tastes that taste great together. I had recently found a fabric scrap at the thrift store that I thought had a kind of pharaoh's headdress look to it, now all I needed was a good cover image.

This is where my pretty artist girlfriend came in. She too is a great fan of ancient Egypt, so she volunteered to draw something for me that I could use for a cover. After some brainstorming we decided on a tomb painting style wall depicting baking and brewing, drawn with colored pencil onto a nice red sand colored mi-tientes paper.

The result is quite lovely. I made covers out of it and used the cloth mentioned earlier for the spine, and glued in my long-stitched codex and dark brown crinkle paper end leaves.

Other details: I used fusible webbing to bind the cloth to its backing paper, a new technique for me, but I'm happy with the results. I also printed my own journal paper, which I've been doing for a while, but this paper has a nice triple-mountain pattern on the bottom, which gives it a nice pro looking quality.