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:

Pamphlet Stitch Binding

In bookbinding, the Pamphlet Stitch is the simplest to learn, and has great potential for creating many types of beautiful and interesting books.

 Fold your cover paper and text block, making sure the direction of the grain is along the spine. I have a handy hole poker. It's best to poke the holes from the inside out, and use a ruler to make your holes evenly spaced.

You will be stitching through most of the holes twice, making crazy 8s through the paper. You can vary the way your binding looks by where you start your stitch - inside or out, middle, top, or bottom. I like to use a variety of found threads. One of my favorite is colored crochet thread, as you see in the photo below.

You can see that I started the sewing on the inside of this book; the outside has a clean finished look, thread coordinating with cover paper.



Below is the inside and outside of a 3-hole pamphlet stitch, with the beginning and ending stitches on the outside. This was a book of poetry my daughter made in 8th grade.

This was a fun, simple project I did with my Girl Scout troop. We made a simple pamphlet book, adding beads as decoration on the outside.



























This is an example of a wedding invitation set that I made. I used pretty endsheet paper that had ripped bits of sheet music. I used a pamphlet stitch with gauzy ribbon as the thread.

























I don't know why I like tiny things so much, but I have made tons of these mini pamphlet books, using them as gift cards or giving them to little nieces and nephews. The one on the right is a matchbook fold. You can make them in a 4 x 6 size, with a really long string that you can wear around your neck.

My cousin made this pretty pamphlet, which has a picture of his mother on the front, and some stories he wrote about her.

And finally, here is an example of a Two-Section Pamphlet Stitch Binding. You make a pleat in the cover, so if you set the cover out by itself, it would form a "W" shape. You sew a section onto each folded spine piece.   I also folded the paper so that it made a pocket on the inside front and back of the book.

 Here is the finished travel book. It is a very simple pamphlet stitch, where I cross over stitches from each section.

Find these stitch samples and more in the instructional book Non-Adhesive Binding: Books without Paste or Glue, by Keith A. Smith.

Minding Our Own Business

I grab these books with picture endsheets (and this one even has the book jacket!) whenever I find them. This one I ripped out the text block and rebound with my own letterpressed lined blank pages.  A long time ago I was trying to figure out how to make hand bound journals with lined pages. All I could find to purchase online were single sheets. To do a sewn book, you need large sheets of paper to fold down to make a "signature". You sew several signatures together then attach your book covers.
Anyway, I couldn't find any large sheets of lined paper, so I had a print shop make a die of lines and then I befriended this great guy in Northfield, MN who had letterpresses. I spent an evening with him printing big sheets of my lined paper. He was so good at perfecting the print - he took a lot of time adjusting the height of the die so that it would make an even print. I love watching someone who is really really good at what they do.

Little Books

I love little. I still have a couple of little things from childhood (a 1/2" Scottie dog magnet, a little doll, some tiny animals, a tiny pencil from the Milwaukee Journal...). So, of course I like to make tiny books. Here are a few samples - a couple are wedding invitations. And there are a couple pages from a photo album of a trip to Paris, complete with pop-up Eiffel Tower.

Piano Hinge Binding

I made this book for Paula's Greg, who wrote a collection of poems about gryphons. I thought leather would be a good cover for a mythical creature, and I wanted to try a piano hinge binding which would secretly contain a picture of a gryphon. I put each poem in its own tri-fold signature and painted a chopstick with which to hold the piano hinge. The endsheets are from this cool paper table cloth my mom brought me from Norway - she knows me well enough to bring me things like that from foreign countries.