Happy Valentine's Day

This is what you need. A Valentine's Day Notebook. Looking vaguely like I have nailed it to a pink Artex ceiling.

Take your fingers away from your eyeballs. Blame Sharon. She made me buy this book. It is responsible for turning this house of ordinary home educating horror into an outsourcing factory of paper crafting hell. I am bearing up.

Looking on the benefits side, we now specialise in supplying superior chunks of cut up paper to the floor. We can cut all types of paper and card in all sizes, thicknesses, and run three finger slicing paper cutters to trim anyone's folios at a moment's notice.

And we are highly trained in the use of skewers. We find these are very useful to hold together bits of cut up paper in long lines. We are not quite sure why we do that, but one day something beautiful will emerge from the psychosis.

Having turned this house into a frenzied paper chopping centre, we are, of course, emerging with books. Books you have never seen the like of, but books that I declare are art. Soon I will dedicate a whole sumptuous photoblog to our efforts. Save your tears till then.

And I am Grit, determined not to break. I am resolved not to be even remotely sorry about this present crafting enthusiasm; not for the endless demand for glue, not the way every table in the house has vanished, and certainly not for the pathetic sight of my once dignified husband attempting to cross the kitchen looking for the bus to Nepal but instead sinking in thigh-deep extracts of glitter paper.

Dig, this is the price we pay for superior hand made paper items in an education type environment. Like the delightful Valentine's Day Notebook, above. Yours for a modest £2,500.

I think this price truly reflects the otherwise loss of income and twenty six hours of crafting disability taken for us to create this beautiful item. OK, it does not have very many pages. Yes, I ripped them out in varying mixtures of accidents, frustrations and ineptitudes. The bleeding heart binding also could not follow the original design because when I tried that, the remaining pages fell out and the cover tore off.

The hand finished decoration proceeded quite well. I stabbed myself in the hand (twice), knocked the decorative beads all over the floor and had a big fight with Squirrel because I wanted her purple Eiffel Tower keyring and she wouldn't give it to me. You can see it in the photograph. Obviously that is not included in the sale because when she found me I had to give it back.

But you can tell that I remain unbroken by this enthusiastic engagement with the dark arts of book making and book binding, even though I now sport three plasters on my hands, a missing thumb and an eye-patch. This is indeed what home craft/education is all about. It is all about learning by doing, making the best of a bad job, looking on the bright side, remaining determined to be unbowed in the face of crushing adversity, and proceeding willfully in the face of all signs saying TURN BACK STOP NOW.

In fact, so determined am I to rip a heart of joy from a swamp of sorrow; to find fulfilment from chaos, chemical hazard and misery, that I can now declare, having passed through the burning fires of pain, that I love hand making books, and may continue to make them even after I am dead.

I know this, because the only bleakness of the craft experience I will truly admit to was the moment I realised that I have no Japanese screw punch. I knew then that I needed one of these tools more than I needed clothes, teeth, or walls for the house.

And yet I went on, never giving up, equipped with a sewing needle sellotaped to a pen. A martyr for Valentine's Day; a martyr for book art. And when you look back at the Artex effort, you can think Idiot.