Blue Gingham Cookbook

My cookbooks have always sold better than my journals.  Why this is, I'm not really sure.  I've used books that were nominally 'journals' for recipe books in the past, and they worked just fine... Maybe it's just nice to have a special-purpose book; makes the activity feel more special.  Anyway, we were are the G-dub a few months ago and stumbled across a bag full of fabric remnants for just a few bucks, and going through it I kept thinking, "this would make great bookcloth".  So we bought it.

 I did something a little bit different this time though; instead of using this blue gingham fabric as a spine, I thought why not use it as a cover?  Gingham with a nice cherry blossom pattern on the inside would be very cookbook-y, has a great country feel to it, and is probably nice and durable too.

So that's what I did.  I used a Coptic-stitch binding, which I haven't done in a while as I've been developing my other binding techniques, and journal paper (because I ran out of recipe paper).  It turned out pretty nice!

This book is for sale!  Check it out on my Etsy shop!

Cherry Blossoms Journal

Ahh, cherry blossoms, a beautiful and unmistakable sign of spring... When I was in college, I used to walk through my campus, which was home to some 60 Japanese cherry trees donated by our sister city in Japan, and enjoy the cherry trees blossoming like pink popcorn, until they reached their full bloom and started blowing off in the breeze... Is it any wonder that Japanese culture reveres the cherry blossom and its aesthetic quality so much?

I thought a nice way to celebrate spring would be to make a cherry blossom themed journal. It took me a while to find good cover paper for it, and I ended up finding it at Michael's of all places. But while the cover paper is beautiful, I think it still needed something else... So I used some pearlescent white paper for inner covers, white crinkle paper for end leaves, and navy blue cloth for the spine.

 

I really like how this book turned out. If I had a use for yet another journal I would likely keep it for myself... But just like there's no hoarding spring, we shouldn't hoard the things that we create either. What is the point of making something beautiful, whether it be art or music or crafts, if not for all to enjoy?

 

This book is for sale!  Check it out on my Etsy shop :)

Penguin Sketchbook

I haven't made many books lately, I know. Life has been very uncooperative the last couple of months. I have made a couple of books, but due to errors they weren't going to be very sellable, or something I wanted to show off. But finally it's coming back together and I've had time to make a book or two.

This sketchbook cover is made from a poster from a puzzle box, given to me by my girlfriend. The paper unfortunately has crease marks from where it was folded, but other than that it's a great cover. I love penguins.

I learned a lot about my new book construction technique by doing this book. The process of gluing the covers together with bookcloth, gluing the codex in, then gluing on the inner covers and end leaves takes a lot more precision than I realized at first, and indeed I glued it all in wrong the first time, resulting in the codex spine folding where I didn't want it to fold and my having to disassemble and re-glue it.

The end result though, after two tries, is very nice. I quite like the double bookcloth cover, kind of reminiscent of a double matte for a painting. It's sewn together nicely, and quite sturdy.

This book is for sale! Buy it on Etsy today! :)

Egyptian Brew Journal

In addition to making books, I also enjoy spending some of my free time brewing beer. It's a hobby I've only recently picked up, and when learning something new, I've always found it handy to keep detailed notes on what I'm doing. I've also been developing my baking skills, which I also want to take notes on. So I got the idea to make a brewing and baking journal.

But what to put on it, and what to make it out of? The Egyptians may not have been the first to brew beer, but they were the biggest brewers of the ancient world. Wages were paid in bread and beer--the original two great tastes that taste great together. I had recently found a fabric scrap at the thrift store that I thought had a kind of pharaoh's headdress look to it, now all I needed was a good cover image.

This is where my pretty artist girlfriend came in. She too is a great fan of ancient Egypt, so she volunteered to draw something for me that I could use for a cover. After some brainstorming we decided on a tomb painting style wall depicting baking and brewing, drawn with colored pencil onto a nice red sand colored mi-tientes paper.

The result is quite lovely. I made covers out of it and used the cloth mentioned earlier for the spine, and glued in my long-stitched codex and dark brown crinkle paper end leaves.

Other details: I used fusible webbing to bind the cloth to its backing paper, a new technique for me, but I'm happy with the results. I also printed my own journal paper, which I've been doing for a while, but this paper has a nice triple-mountain pattern on the bottom, which gives it a nice pro looking quality.

Botanical Ceramics NW Design Book

This is a book I made for Christmas for my girlfriend's sister, who runs a home ceramics business.  She is forever doing new, creative things with clay, and I thought she might enjoy a design book to sketch new ideas in.  This book was built a lot like my last book, but of course is a completely different style.

The sparkly purple front cover (which, after taking these photos, I added the Botanical Ceramics logo in silhouette to) is made from one of my favorite book cover materials, a gift bag.  I also added some punk girl ribbon to spice it up a bit.

The back cover is the same material but no logo or ribbon.

The sewing is heavyweight hemp cord...

And the inside cover is an eggplant colored linen paper.  The drawing paper is again 80 lb. drawing paper cut to 18x12 and folded in half.

Map of America Sketchbook

This is a book I made for Christmas for my girlfriend's father, who is an artist and a map-maker at the USGS.  In that spirit, I thought a durable sketchbook he could draw in while taking the bus to work would be a nice gift, and found a plastic-covered map of the United States at Goodwill that I thought might make a nice cover.

I've never worked with this particular material for covers before, and it was harder to work than I thought.  The cover ended up with bubbles I wasn't able to work out, as the glue didn't adhere very well to the plastic covering.  The upshot to this is that it is very durable, water resistant and scuff resistant.

For the inside cover I used a nice blue damask patterned paper...

The pages are 18x12 80 lb. drawing paper (folded in half for a final page size of 9x12), cut to size from 18x24 original paper that I buy in bulk.

I learned a lot about my stitching technique using alternating colors for each section.  If you're not happy with your Coptic stitch, I recommend doing a black/white alternation.

Snowy Mountain Book w/Cloth Spine / Making Bookcloth

Something I've been wanting to do for a while is use bookcloth in a book.  I enjoy the look and feel of a quarter-bound book--cloth really gives a book a feeling of permanence, to me.  I've also thought for a while that by using my long-stitch sewing technique to bind the pages to heavy paper or card, and gluing the card to a cover, I can create a sturdier book than many traditionally-bound books, and one that would be easier to re-bind if necessary, since there's no paste or glue on the signatures.

Bookcloth, however, is quite expensive!  $8 for an 18x19" sheet at my local art store.  I might get two full-bound books out of that, or perhaps a dozen quarter-bound, but even if price weren't an issue, I'd still be limited to the 4 colors that they have on hand.  For some reason I never thought to myself, "self, why don't you make your own bookcloth?" until recently... it's pretty simple to do too (sorry no pictures!):

1. Select a cloth.  It should be woven fairly tight; muslin is excellent.  Wash if necessary and iron it as flat as you can.
2. Using a foam brush, get a sheet of paper (I used copy paper for this book, but it was a little heavier than would be ideal) covered in a thin, even layer of PVA glue.  Don't skimp on the glue!  If the paper warps a little bit from it, you're doing fine.  Allow the glue to set slightly--a couple of minutes is great for PVA--but not to dry.
3. Lay the cloth on top of the paper, turn over so the front side of the cloth is down, lay it on a piece of wax paper, and roll with a rubber roller or even a rolling pin.  Turn it over to make sure the bubbles are pressed out and the cloth is nice and flat.  If not, roll it some more.
4. Dry flat between two boards.  Cut to size with a rotary cutter and enjoy!

The first book I made with this bookcloth was not to sell, but actually a functional book for myself, to track what bills I have and haven't paid each month.  I went with plain paper, and a cover made from the picture in an Oregon-themed calendar.

You can see I did goof slightly and made the cloth part of the spine too narrow, thus having to glue the cover on a little far out.  I'll have to remember to add a half inch or so of extra space for the spine in the future.

I dig how the top of the long-stitch sewing looks just a little bit like a headband!  A few more decorative stitches and it would look great... perhaps on my next one.

Holographic Hot Rod Sketchbook

An irony of modern life is that so much of the best art and photography that we see in our daily lives are there solely to try and sell us something we don't need. Advertisement makes up almost all of the public art we see daily. And when it's gone, it's often lost forever! Although I have no particular desire to save advertisements, I do sometimes think it would be nice to save the art in some of them... and the Oregon Lottery poster for their Classic Black game jumped out at me and said "use me!"

I was quite attracted to its holographic backing and image of a lovely classic roadster. This is the first square sketchbook I've made, and as usual I tried a new thing or two. Using thick poster stock for paper was of course the first; it was hard to work with, and even in the finished, fully glued book, the edges stick up a little bit where the paper is getting rebellious. I also made the pages the same height as the covers--not necessarily advised, as they do stick out a little.

All in all I'm pretty happy with it though; it's a gorgeous book and has very good drawing paper in it. :)

This book is for sale! Buy it on Etsy and make me rich :)

King Tut Sketchbook

One thing I really love about bookbinding is being able to make covers out of things that I like and think are cool, but which would probably just be hanging around collecting dust if I didn't do something with them.  I love decorative paper, but it would be pretty weird to buy it and then just stick it in a box, pausing every once in a while to admire it.  There's plenty of package art that I enjoy, but keeping it around just to look at would be too much clutter.  Making these things into book covers lets me enjoy them for a long time to come, while actually getting a useful object out of them.

I was discussing this all with my ladyfriend, and she got the idea to make a book out of her King Tut shopping bag that she had been saving from our trip to the Tutankhamun exhibit in Seattle.  I've previously made gift bags into book covers, and found it is in fact an excellent material for them, being much more resilient than uncoated paper.  She's an artist, so I made her a sketchbook.

 This is the first sketchbook I've ever made, so I had a few engineering challenges.  First, the illustration board I use for book covers is rigid, but I didn't know how it would hold up at the dimensions I was trying for--9"x12.5".  Using two pieces of it glued together, on the other hand, would probably be too much for my hole puncher to punch through.  I ended up using illustration board bonded with a softer cardboard, to make it thicker and stronger but still holepunchable.

Next was the paper.  I've been having a hard time finding good quality drawing paper at a low enough price that I can make books out of it without breaking the bank, but for this project I would need not only good quality paper, but large good quality paper.  With my chosen cover size (chosen so that I could use as much gift bag as possible), I needed 24" long paper.  I ended up buying a huge pad of 18x24" of drawing paper at Blick, and cutting it to dimension.  Which introduced another challenge--cutting 24" of paper with a 22" cutting mat. :)

I wanted the inside covers to be in the same theme as the outside covers, but I didn't have any paper on hand that had an Egyptian feel to it.  Nor did I have any paper more than 12" wide.  I ended up buying a sheet of real Egyptian papyrus to use.  The two sheets of papyrus on the covers cost more than the 30 sheets of drawing paper they contain, but they give the book a real quality feel to it.

Finally I sewed it together with thick braided cotton cord.  I wish the hole punching were a bit cleaner ($8 Home Depot hole punches are rubbish BTW), but that's the only complaint I have with how this book turned out.  All in all it's a gorgeous object that inspires me to draw something Egyptian!

Bright Floral Notepad

Taking notes is something I do every day, usually on some form of scrap paper or a sticky note or something.  Notepads are handy, but I always wished they looked a little bit cooler...  So I thought to myself, "self, why don't you make a notepad that looks just a little bit striking?"  So I did.

This 4x6" notepad incorporates a gorgeous floral pattern, and uses a Japanese stab binding with a hinged top cover and rigid back cover, good for a writing surface.  I said I probably wouldn't use embroidery floss again, and for a Coptic binding I probably won't, but I found it (when waxed) to be excellent for stab binding, as it's cheap, strong, and colorful.

This book is for sale!  Buy it on Etsy for $4 + s/h.

Hearts and Skulls Journal

A book for a punk girl who likes to write, this journal has an Ed Hardy looking hearts and skulls paper for the covers, made from, of all things, a gift bag.  It was somewhat challenging to work with, being made of a plastic-covered paper, but the final effect is very nice and it has a good looking gloss finish.

Otherwise a pretty normal journal: Coptic binding with black linen thread, my custom made journal-lined paper, etc.

This book is for sale! Buy it on Etsy for $10 + s/h.

Green Argyle Journal

In most of my book projects so far, I've experimented with something new or different.  This project on the other hand, is one of my first--if not the first--where I didn't really try anything new per se, but rather tried to develop some polish.  All of the techniques I used for this book were previously developed, from my spine papers to my cover and publisher's page.

Since there isn't anything experimental, I think this is possibly my most polished, finished looking book yet.  The stitching is even and attractive, the covers are tight, the paper on the covers is nicely applied.  I'm starting to feel like I'm getting decent at this ol' Coptic stitch. :)  The green argyle paper is just beautiful, and the orange linen stitching complements it very well, I think.

This book is for sale!  Buy it on Etsy for $10 + s/h.

Purple Plaid Recipe Book

After making my first recipe book and enjoying it, I decided to make another.  I thought something a little punk-girl would be fun, so I got some dark purple plaid paper and eggplant linen paper for the inner covers, and got to work.

With this book, as with most books I've made, I tried something new.  It occurred to me how odd it is in Coptic stitching to have gorgeous covers and brightly colored thread, yet leave the spine the dull blank white of the paper within.

My idea: use scrap cover paper on the ends.  I cut it into 1 inch strips, folded it, holepunched it, and worked them right into the sewing process, on the outsides of each signature.  Beautimous!  This was also the first book I made with a title page and publisher page.

This book is for sale!  Buy it on Etsy for $10 + s/h.