bookbinding

 One of the things I clearly intended to do during this year's studio residency at Signal Arts Centre, was make some more books. I had a fabric sampler folder and thought I would make a number of cloth covered books for Signal's annual Christmas Craft Fair. Having this in mind, I bought a pair of pinking shears in order to cut the cloth but the other very important aspect of bookbinding is measure, measure and measure!

I decided fairly early on that I was going to do a simple Japanese stab binding technique and, after matching various coloured threads to various patterned cloth designs, it was a fairly simple operation. this picture shows how a piece of wire acts as a specific placeholder until I get my needle and thread to it.

On larger books I also use pieces of cardboard and lion clips to hold the covers in place while I bind. On this one I decided to use some beads for embellishment.

Here are the cloth-covered books I made for the craft fair. They are all A5 in size, but the top two are bound as landscape while the others are portrait.

I used brightly coloured paper as endpapers in the blank notebook/sketchbooks.

I had a few bits of other material so I made an A5 leather-covered book and 2 A5 vinyl-oilcloth books.

The Christmas Craft Fair runs at Signal Arts Centre daily (Sunday included) from 10am-5pm until December 24th.