Brown Paper Blank Book

Today I completed a Coptic stitched blank journal/notebook made from paper bags and pieces of an old wall map. I saw a post on the Internet for Books made from paper bags  here and decided to give it a try myself. I did make a few changes in the process to complete my book.

I used paper lunch bags for the paper and added a soft cover with a double layer of paper from a wall map of the world that was torn and had been thrown away. It was a new map but had been designed to look like an antique map so it already had an creamy aged look. I though this would go well with the brown paper from the bags.

I used 18 paper lunch bags opened and cut to 9.5 inches by 14 inches each. Each sheet was folded in half so the the book will be 9.5 inches tall by 7 inches wide. There are 6 signatures with 3 sheets each. I cut 2 pieces, also 9.5" x 14", from the old map and folded them in half to be the front and back cover of the book. The book has a total of 36 leaves or 72 pages (front and back).

I prepared all the paper as shown in the demo. The paper was crunched, quickly dipped in water and hung on a drying rack in my bathtub to drip dry. This has to be done quickly because the lighter weight paper has to be handled gently while it is wet or it will fall apart. Once it dries it will be fine. After all the paper was dry I folded it neatly, stacked it and left it under a large pile of heavy books. By morning they were still nicely crinkled but basically flat. All ready to be sewn into a book.

The basic book is composed of a total of 8 signatures. Six brown paper signatures and the front and back cover also counted as signatures even though they are just one sheet of paper each. I used a basic Coptic stitching technique to complete the binding of the book. There are numerous instructions and videos on the Internet demonstrating this process. The most straightforward one I have seen is here .

The last thing I did was glue the two sheets of paper for both the front and back cover together to form a solid double layer for each cover. I use acrylic gel medium as my glue. And all this goes back under a pile of books to keep everything flat while the glue dries. A few hours is usually enough. Now all I have to do is decide if I want to do any more embellishment to this book but, at this point it is ready to be used.