Bookbinding

I had made a couple different kinds of books before in my calligraphy class, and they turned out nice. Currently, they are in a box somewhere in our storage unit, I’m not quite sure where, so I don’t have any pictures of them. A couple of weeks ago, I made a few more using some techniques I learned on the internet (you can learn anything on the Internet…). I did take some pictures of them, though the light is kind of harsh since I snapped the photos on the kitchen table with the sun beating in through the sliding glass door.

First up is a Japanese stab stitch binding, which was super easy and quick.

I decided to use it to make a little picture book that we can send to my niece in New York. The cover is heavy chipboard wrapped in scrapbook paper and the pages are textured colored cardstock. It’s bound with red crochet thread.

Next we have a Coptic stitch book. I had never heard of this style before, so I did a little research and this is a style of binding that was used by Christians in Egypt (known as the Copts) between the 2nd and 11th centuries .

You can kind of see a little bubble where I didn’t get the fabric glued down very well. But if you didn’t notice it, forget I said anything.

This makes a little chain stitch across the bound edge which is kind of pretty. The book also lays completely flat when opened, so it’s nice for sketchbooks.

The embellishment on front is a crocheted flower from cotton thread with gold tone glass beads. The curlicues are backstitched in gold embroidery floss, which was kind of a bear to work with as it has a mind of its own.

The fabric is from Walmart, and they advertised it as “fashion leather”. I just glued it to some heavy chipboard. The pages are watercolor paper, since that’s what I had on hand at the time.

The last book I made was a traditionally bound hard cover.

The fabric is green polyester upholstery sample that I got from Rory’s aunt. I’ve seen some other books that have some kind of tie around them, so I decided to use some ribbon for that.
I used gold cardstock for the endpapers. The whole color scheme is kind of reminiscent of the 70s. The pages are just white cardstock.

I ran into a few issues with this book. First of all, I cut the covers the same size as my pages, which only seems logical. However, when you are covering your bookboards, you leave a ¼“ or so between the cover and the spine in order to be able to open and close the book without damaging it. I did not allow for this, so my covers stick out beyond the pages on the side, but it lines up perfectly on the top and bottom, so it looks a little weird, at least to me. The glue was really wet, so it made my endpapers wrinkle a little and the chipboard I used for the covers curled a little bit. The upholstery fabric is thick, so I need to figure out a different way of handling the corners to cut down some of the bulk.

I was also sort of impatient and inadvertently skipped a couple steps before I put the pages in the book, which resulted in this:

You’re supposed to glue a paper down the bound side of your signatures (groups of pages). If I had done that, I wouldn’t have had these gaping holes where you can see the binding tape. Oh well, I’ll remember that for next time.