Section Stitched

A new travel diary. It's the pair to the simplified binding notebook below, and also done in onlay book cloth using similar colours. I've decided it is a technique I really like, but there are a few tricks to it. First is, no matter how much you think you can get away with it, that blade, however lightly use, has to be replaced with a new one. Then, it really only works with library buckram (or similar coated cloth - otherwise the threads become uncontrolable). You have to push the cloth together hard or there will be minute gaps. Lastly, you are going to use a lot of sticky tape. Live with it.

Mistakes - covered the wrong face of the boards. Despite going through the whole process thinking 'it's annoying that this face is curved', it didn't occur to me until the minute after finishing the onlay that it shouldn't be.

It took K eight months to write his honours thesis and it took me two years to bind it. I guess he knew what he was doing.

Another simplified binding. They have the great advantage (as I've said before) that you can mess up the cover and not have damaged the text.

In this case that was important as I only had one sheet of the endpaper. You can just see it poking out. It's an old fashion-style periodic table. Turns out one sheet wasn't enough for both end papers. Which bring me to what I learnt from this book. Endpapers are the same for a reason. The paper I used for the back endpaper shrank differently from the front endpaper, and now the spine has a slight twist.

The cover design is based on a diagram of the interactions of some of the molecules he was studying. It took me a long time to work out a way to do justice to the symmetry and simplicity of chemistry and give it interest. A also thought it was a good way to use up paper scraps that were taking up space. Needless to say, I ended up buying several more sheets to fill out some of the colours.

I've been taking one on one lessons from a bookbinder this year and last week I finally finished my first project.

It's a style of book I hadn't made before called 'simplified binding', in which the covers are created separately. For the cover, I wanted to try a technique which is used on leather and see if I could make it work in bookcloth. I couldn't find anyone online doing it and my teacher hadn't seen it done so we experimented.

The Book of Nom (below) was a kind of naive attempt at a simplified/Bradel hybrid and was a first stab at bookcloth inlay. So this notebook was me learning how to do it right.

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I made probably five or so plaquettes, trying out different techniques for gluing and cutting before I settled on the one that worked best. It also gave me a chance to try our different colour combination.

I love the spine cloth. It's this one here. I'm quite tempted to do another using these cloths where the colours stay the same but the texture changes.

I'm more than happy with the end result, the design is inspired by the kind of things my Dad made. Unfortunately the photo has artifacts at the colour changes

Another simplified binding. I used all the techniques I learned from the bookcloth marquetry simplified binding notebook, plus tried to extend a few.

I used handle letters to title the spine after I had made the spine piece but before I wrapped it around dowel to shape it. This meant I had to work fast to avoid the PVA drying before I could shape it. I mixed the PVA with paste to slow the drying time.

The pieces on the front of the book (a paper dolly with a boy's and a girl's 18thC outfit to reflect Leon/Leonie) were at the limits of what I could achieve. The green in the neck of the shirt started to fray because the bookcloth was so narrow. It was hard to get it to sit right. I used double sided tape to hold the pieces in place while I cut through both layers, and a scalpel instead of an exacto knife. I had to be careful not to get the double sided tape on the decorative cloth. Even a slight angle of the knife created a differences in the size of the hole and the size of the piece to be placed in.

The foil attached to some of the decorative cloth better than others. Each piece of the dress/shirt/trousers was cut separately even if they were of the same cloth, to give better structure to the clothing using the grain to distinguish them.

I could have included another waste/fly sheet when I stitched in the endpapers, so that I could fill and sand with an attached piece instead of having to drop one in.

A cook book for X. Simplified binding again. I'm a bit out of practice, so there are some things I'd do differently - the circles on the cover, for instance, I should have use a circle cutter for.

Usually I glue the spine board in and then letter, getting it wrapped around a dowel before it's dry - that way I can be sure I get the lettering central. But I thought the letters would take too long, so I took a chance and lettered first - turned out well. I really like the white foil.

The cover evolved. Originally the yellow dots and PacMan were blank, but it didn't look right. With each dot or line I added, I was sure this was the addition that would ruin the cover. There's no undoing the foiling. The eye of the PacMan was a late addition. At first I freehanded it, but it looked messy. I used the hole in a metal ruler as a guide and coloured in. Still not as even as I'd like but all right.

The lettering was printed out and traced onto tracing paper, which i used as a guide to freehand with the ascona tool. I like the hand drawn computer game vibe it has.

This was my project for the Stage 3 course at Amazing Paper. It's an old Complete Shakespeare. Not an heirloom, bought to take apart and put back together. I had the worst cold of my life during this course and it went for the entire six weeks. I had trouble motivating myself to leave home at 6pm for two and a half hours of bookbinding every Thursday.

But to the actual book. I didn't restitch, so the tapes and the endpapers were stitched into the existing book. The endpapers were 'made', two sheets laminated together. The headbands are hand stitched double core using embroidery thread split in half. I must push the stitches tighter together next time. The cores were made using extra long cigarette paper around book thread. The woman at the corner store looks at me differently now.

I mixed the paint on the edge decoration to match the endpapers, and speckled a darker green over the top. Next time, I must unfold all the corners before doing decoration. The colour is darker than I planned as the paper didn't take the colour evenly.

The boards are laced-in, and then laminated with cartridge paper and sanded to remove the unevenness of the tape, as is the spine to hide the thread.

I never used leather before, so this was my biggest learning curve, dying and paring kangaroo leather to complement the other colours. As usual I used recessing under the bookcloth for decoration, and laser printed a label for the front. I would have liked to make a leather/gold foil label for the spine but I ran out of time, even though Rosemarie graciously allowed us an extra week of her time. Oh well, I may add it at some later stage.