A Month of Bookbinding

After spending more than a year buried in quilting projects I decided to switch gears and catch up on a pile of unfinished bookbinding projects.

These are pocket size notebooks with hand painted canvas covers and several different types of  papers for pages.

And a few mini notebooks with painted canvas covers.
 

 A pile of mini long stitch leather books.

I spent some time learning how to do a French Link bookbinding stitch in different sizes using some heavy drawing paper.

And made a couple map paper junk books just for the fun of it, also with painted canvas covers.

Finally I had a couple more leather projects that were a little larger to finish and I wanted to do something different for the binding so I tried this neat criss-cross stitch. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, I just had to map it out on paper and in my head before I started.

Thanks for reading.

Aileen

A Little Prototype Book Project

I just finished this prototype little book.  It's 5 1/2" by 3 1/2" and filled with an assortment of papers including old book pages, atlas pages, drawing paper, graph paper, old blank workbook pages, painted pages, and brown paper. Basically stuff many other people might throw away. The cover is made from bonded fabric that has been folded (and ironed) instead of using a heavy paper for the cover. The binding is a simple long-stitch bookbinding method. 

The fabric for the cover was actually also an experimental project. It was a simple navy blue cotton that I stenciled with freezer paper and sprayed with bleach water to make the checkered heart pattern. I called this project a prototype because I've never made a book with this kind of bonded fabric cover. I didn't have any instructions to go by and I had no idea how it might come out but I suspected it would work. 

The book construction method is not new. There are many places you can find instructions for long-stitched books with heavy paper covers. There are a number of books and examples I referenced to understand the basic construction techniques. The experimental part was making a stiff paper like cover using fabric without glue or cardboard. 

Thanks for reading.

Aileen