Before / after (and during) pics of my bookbinding activities last week—making a shinier versi
Before / after (and during) pics of my bookbinding activities last week—making a shinier version of a friend’s favourite book for her birthday :) As regards the technique, I tried to improvise a combination of a Japanese stab binding and a Belgian secret binding, and a lot of things went wrong in the process, but it was fun trying to figure out how to make it work, and my friend likes the look of it.(Giving a handmade present, you’re always excruciatingly aware of every little flaw it has and feel mortified, and your friends are always like no it’s perfect how dare you insult my beautiful birthday gift)Some more pics of the process below!Making the covers and the spine (my leather was too thick for how narrow the spine was, and I couldn’t find my paring knife so I ended up using paper that looks like leather)Choosing the cover paper and endpapers:Preparing the corners:I messed up the positioning of the upper corner of the back cover, but that’s what the back of the book is for anyway. You hide your mistakes there.The covers spent the night in the pressI do have proper hole punching tools but ended up using a hammer and a nail because I decided to sew the book as a unit rather than separate the pages and make signatures (you need a sewing machine and it takes forever; I had a tight deadline)I sewed the book to the spine & covers like this—essentially treating it like one big signature:It worked just fine! I’m never making efforts again.I only had a vague plan in mind when I made the holes; next time I do this I will try to draw a little map with direction arrows beforehand or something. As I was sewing I kept being like “what am I trying to do again? which way do I go”I’ll need more attempts to figure out this hybrid technique (for books that don’t have the substantial margins that Japanese stab bindings require, nor the signatures that you need for Belgian secret bindings.) I messed up here in the middle (it was supposed to be symmetrical with 4 double threads and 2x3 single threads on the spine) but my friend said it gives her book character.After another 12 hours in the press, it looks and feels like a book and it’s prettier and more colourful than the original copy, so I’m giving myself a B+ on this first try :) -- source link