Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - Grail Diary

I’ve had the materials for this for months, but never got around to starting it because it's new crafting territory and I'm chicken. With a few other prop projects on hold and not in the mood to sew, last weekend was a good time to finally get to it.

The plan is to do one “batch” of more or less the correct pages, and then instead of repeating those pages, create my own in the same style using other medieval history and Grail lore to fill up the rest of the book.

I started with a hardcover unlined sketchbook, about 4x6”, 220 pages, so a pretty close match for size (or close enough for my purposes).


I sanded the cover, then peeled off the endpapers and removed the pages from the inside.


From there I followed this Instructable for the new leather cover, jumping ahead to step 7. I was surprised how fun and easy it was, and I wish I hadn't put it off for so long.


Once the cover was on and everything was reassembled, I took a little leather polish to the cover to bring some of the color back. (The weird stripes are from the light coming through blinds, not part of the leather.)


Now just waiting on endpaper which hopefully will be here in a week or so.

Endpaper is done, but it's kind of a mixed bag.

The paper ended up being a bit thicker and smaller than I expected, but the marble and color were really nice so I decided to use it anyway. Which meant I had to cut the sheets in half and glue each side in separately. This wasn't ideal but it was manageable, but I wasn't as careful with it as I could/should have been. I did some weathering over the edges to soften/blend them a bit (make the paper look more natural in the book basically) and hide some of my mistakes, which did work but also led to a more weathered journal than I intended (haven't worked up the courage/energy to photograph the weathering yet). So I'm not totally happy, but it's *okay* for now.

keepcalmcostume said:

Endpaper is done, but it's kind of a mixed bag.

The paper ended up being a bit thicker and smaller than I expected, but the marble and color were really nice so I decided to use it anyway. Which meant I had to cut the sheets in half and glue each side in separately. This wasn't ideal but it was manageable, but I wasn't as careful with it as I could/should have been. I did some weathering over the edges to soften/blend them a bit (make the paper look more natural in the book basically) and hide some of my mistakes, which did work but also led to a more weathered journal than I intended (haven't worked up the courage/energy to photograph the weathering yet). So I'm not totally happy, but it's *okay* for now.

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Looking good so far, well done

Monkey540 said:

Looking good so far, well done

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Thanks!