Black Leather and Plaid: A love story

This is the first longstitch book I'll be offering for sale on my Etsy. I'm pretty excited about it because I think it's a great book, and I've solved a couple of problems with this one.

Problem number one: Recycled leather
I would say that the leather I've been using has been great quality, it's just recycled from coats and purses. Coat and purse leather is usually lined with material that may or may not come completely off of the back of the leather. As I have dismantled perfectly good coats and purses, I have found that there is often times sticky residue, or the leather just wasn't made to have it's back side being shown off or rubbing against paper.
Solution: Back the leather with fabric

When I replenished my supply of heat n' bond the other day for making book cloth, I noticed on the package that it said it could be fused to all sorts of things, including leather. I thought that was nifty, then forgot about it until I visited KarleighJae's etsy. She sells some beautiful books, and I noticed that some of them were lined with fabric. I wondered, "How does she do that?" and then 'DING!' duh! heat n' bond!
I wasn't positive, but I decided to try it out. It also helped that KarleighJae had a great video tutorial on how to iron leather.

At first, I didn't think it was working. The corners were peeling off, and it just didn't look like it was sticking. Then I realized my iron had turned itself off (which it does as a safety feature every half an hour). Once I got it back up to heat, it seemed to be doing a lot better (imagine that). I was also immensely pleased when I was trimming the leather later and found it very hard to tear the fabric from the leather. It was possible, but it required a conscious effort.

Then, I had a fear of the edges fraying. They were fine now, but what about two weeks later, after it had been jostled about in a purse or something? I solved this problem by "painting" the edges with gloss medium. The stuff you use with paint to make it shiny. Not the most orthodox approach, I'm sure, but it effectively ceases the fraying, and is not visible unless you look for it.

Problem two: Thick books = a lot of holes
I like books with girth. If I want a girthy longstitch book, I have to punch a lot of holes, right? Punching holes is a pain, especially since I struggle with right angles/ lining paper up to a piece of leather. This book has 11 signatures. There's no way I wanted to punch that many holes, so I only made holes for five. I sewed in the first five signatures, then went back and sewed in the other 6 using the same holes. I feel pretty awesome right now. I think it looks pretty cool, and it solved my problem of not wanting to make any more holes than necessary. The cool thing is, I don't even have to do that. I can just sew under the signatures that are already in place if I want to sew more in. Ya, I know, I'm groovy.

So, that's the book. I sewed a button onto the front so it could have a pretty little button closure. The strap was some leftover material I had, so it worked out perfectly. I think the button and the thread coordinate nicely with the colors of the plaid.

Wedding Card book

This is my latest and greatest book. I saw the coolest idea on a blog a while back (this isn't the one, but I couldn't find it again, and you get the idea), and I'm just now putting it to use. See, I've had these wonderful wedding cards sitting in a bag (in a box) in the storage room for a while, and I was looking through them thinking, "gee, it sure is hard to throw something like this away! It's a wedding memento! I'll only have wedding cards once in my life!" and some of these cards are lovely. So that made me think of something we'd talked about in my Business for the Professional Artist class. The idea is, when you send out a promotional piece, make it really special. Make it so groovy that people will have a hard time throwing it away. So, I took my already awesome wedding cards and I made them doubly awesome by binding them into a book! Tada!

I know, I'm awesome. Keep in mind though, this wasn't originally my idea, I just expounded on it (is that even the right word?). I started off by separating my cards into stacks of similar sizes. There are ginormous ones, medium size ones, and eetsy beetsy ones. I started with the medium sized ones. I decided to bind them in a case bound form. 

It was more difficult to bind cards than I had anticipated. first off, each card was it's own  signature, so for this book I think I have like 15 or 18 signatures, which takes a lot of thread and a long time to sew. It's not difficult, per say, except for the fact that when the factory (or whoever makes and folds all these cards) folds the cards, some of them are sliced or scored so they will bend easier. It's nice, they stay shut, which is the purpose, but it is therefore  very easy to pull the thread too hard and rip right through the spine of the card. Grrr! I must have done that like twenty times! Other than that, it was fine.

For the cover (I think this was a jolt of brilliant inspiration) I made my own paper by gluing bits and pieces of the envelopes that the cards came in to a piece of tissue paper, and then gluing it down to my book board. I used tissue paper 1. Because it was what I had at the moment, 2. Because the envelopes were thick enough as it was, I didn't need them layered on top of some thick paper, and 3. Because I could rearrange and then trim the paper before I glued it down. Some of the pieces of the envelopes that I used were stamps, the post office stamps (like the ones that say, Spokane, WA) because I thought it was cool all the places we got letters from, and some of the pieces that said our names on them. Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman, Laurel Hoffman, etc.

The color book cloth I used was not one of my wedding colors, which would have been cool, I just thought it went really well with the envelopes and stamps. On the spine I carved a heart in the book board and then pressed it down in with my bone folder. It was my first try at doing that sort of thing, and I think it went well.

So, I think I've talked enough. Here are some pics of the book, and if anyone wants me to do this for them, let me know, we'll work something out (monetary compensation, cheesecake for a couple of weeks, something along those lines :) ).

Make Your Own Bookcloth, yo.

Here's my groovylicious video I did for Art Business. It's about making bookcloth, which is kind of fun. Enjoy!

Books, books, books!

I finally got a closure attached to my coptic stitch book from a previous post. I ended up hunting the little bugger down at a Michael's craft store. I think it looks pretty dang good, and it sure does the job.
As far as new books I've learned recently, there's the case bound and the cord bound. These were really exciting for me, and I think for the whole class, because they look like "real" books!
First off, there's the case bound. It's pretty basic, sewing wise. The new things about this one are the covered spine, the introduction of end bands (or headbands, you can see they're green on the second picture), and end papers (the lining or shell papers on the inside cover of the book). I struggled the most with the end papers. After doing a couple of books with them I'm wondering if thinner paper would work better than the thick stuff I've been using. On the book with the brown cover and the orange ribbon, the end paper was thinner and it looks beautiful. On the blue book it was scrapbook paper and didn't work so well.

Next we did the cord bound book, which has a leather spine stretched over cords. We used jute for the cording and it worked great. the biggest problem or concern i had with this one is, when I folded the leather down, the glue and the dye from the leather left pink residue on the pages. I'm not really happy with this, but I don't know how to fix it. You can see it on the first picture. We learned with this one how to round the spine, which is a more traditional look, as compared to the flat spine of the case bound book above. It looks cool, but I struggled with it.
This is just the practice dummy for the cord bound book. I'm excited to get the "real" one done. I've got some fun ideas for it, and I think I'm going to use some of my marbled paper that I made in class. I get so excited for this class it's ridiculous.

Book arts = Parkour?

Book arts, I've decided, is kind of like parkour, or free running. Jim, from The Office said,

"This is parkour. Internet sensation of 2004. And it was in one of the Bond films. It's pretty impressive. The goal is to get from point A to point B as creatively as possible so technically they are doing parkour, as long as point A is delusion and point B is the hospital."

Allright, so book binding isn't quite as exciting or dangerous as parkour, but the way I see it, the more creative you are with it, the better. I'm just learning, some of the different bindings and techniques, but I have had a lot of fun trying to come up with creative ways to do this. For example, I just learned how to do a coptic binding, which was way fun. Traditionally, it looks like this.
I played around with the sewing stations template a little bit and this is the result I got.
Before I made this book I decided I wanted a beefy book. Lots of pages. I also wanted small. Evidently they don't work so well together as the book board isn't weighty enough to hold the pages down and together. The center picture shows what the book looks like it it's "resting" position. I think it's kind of funny, but nevertheless, I shall continue to work on it, adding a clasp of some sort. I'm never done with anything.