Puella Press: upcycled

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

A Book a Week 2014: Made, Altered, Repaired. Week 31

Week of 4 Aug

Belgian Binding Class!

I was really impressed with the folks who came to try out Belgian Binding. It is not an easy or beginning binding, but everyone concentrated and we learned from each other as we went. I loved the beautiful color combinations each person chose, to go with their upcycled Readers' Digest book covers.

I buy large packs of pretty scrapbook paper, and use those sheets as covers for each signature. It's fun to find a theme of papers related by color, hue or design. Students matched signature covers with their RD book covers.

I like to use a variety of crochet thread to bind books. They come in so many colors, and even multi-colored threads:

Monday, January 27, 2014

A Book A Week 2014: Made, Altered, or Repaired. Week 1

During 2014, I am going to post each week about a book I have made, altered, or repaired. And I'll even do it retroactively, since it's Jan 27 already. Here goes:

Week of 6 Jan 2014.

Here is photo documentation of the books we made at the library. Using our new empty Makerspace room, our goal was to make 100 blank books out of recycled materials to catalog and make available for patrons to check out and hand write their own local history. Our project was called Your Community Your Library Your Story. We used discarded fiction books from our library, sawed off the spines, pulped the text blocks to make new paper and used the discarded covers as new ones.

Here you see I used book repair tape to join the covers.

We used a simple 5-hole pamphlet style binding.

You can see the stitching on the outside.

Fun to see the finished books, all different colors.

Me and Deanna. See how proud she is?

I had a smaller project for people to make and take home. Here you see little 3-hole pamphlet stitch books, with folded paper covers and pretty colored crochet yarn.