Vanity Fair and Plaid (coming out my ears)

I'm doing some summer reading. Is fun. After reading the newest Wheel of Time book, The Gathering Storm, I realized that I didn't have the slightest clue what was going on, so I started to re-read the series. So far there are twelve books, I think, and they're really good reading if you're into the whole fantasy genre. I like the series because there's a ton of plot detail, and the story line jumps from character to character, making it fun and quick. If I get bored or annoyed with one person, I just have to read a few more pages and it jumps to the next one. Gotta love it.

Besides that series, I recently picked up the book Vanity Fair, by William Thackeray. I'm about halfway through it right now, and I'm really enjoying it. Thackeray has an awesome sense of humor which catches me off guard sometimes, probably because I'm more used to the writing style of Jane Austen or Charlotte and Emily Bronte. He seems to enjoy making fun of his characters, much to my amusement. I'm looking forward to seeing how the rest of this book plays out.

Enough about my reading escapades, my real purpose here today is to put up pictures of my latest book! It's a case bound book, but I'm happy to report that it is behaving quite nicely, and it turned out well. Finally! A case bound book that works!

 

The blue ribbon bookmark and blue and white end bands come standard with this model. Check it out in my shop!

Boom shaka laka laka

Yay! I got another book posted on my Etsy. This one is a pretty black and red number with some black and white floral paisley lokta paper (that I LOVE). The end papers are black lokta.

 

You can actually write or draw right down to the margins of this book.

 

 

On the back cover you can see there's was a little issue between the glue and the paper (in the upper right). I don't know what happened, but you can see the book board through the clear spot of glue. It's all rather upsetting. Between that and the fact that somehow I let this book only have seven signatures (112 pages total!), which is way too small, I'm selling this book for $20.00. It's a great starter journal though, or a good journal for someone who only writes sporadically. And I really love black and red together. I've seen some really pretty weddings with this color scheme.

Pretty in Pink

Here's my latest book. It is bound with the case binding technique, which is fun, and is made with some of my favorite homemade book cloth. I found the material for this book cloth at DI about a week ago (I celebrated school being out for the semester by buying myself some DI fabric and a cute outfit... and a couple of pairs of shoes... and a leather scrap coat... ok, ok, and a book, all for under $30! I love thrifting), and just made it last night, which was so fun. Anyways, I have a couple of other fabrics that I think would look lovely with this fabric, I just have yet to figure out how to put them all together.

Anyways, I had fun making this book. I tried out a new way to glue the tapes down on the inside of the covers. I started by figuring out where they would go, traced around them, then cut out a few layers of the book board, just like I would if I was embossing. Then, I glued the tapes into their designated spaces, and voila! They didn't show up after I put the end paper on! I'm happy I finally tried this out after Sister Simpson suggested it a while back. Especially since the tapes I'm using are really thick, and would look awkward under the end papers. I think this method makes the book look a little more professional.

I listed this item in my shop hoping it will make a good choice for a Mother's day gift. I dunno. It's pretty, and I think it would be a sweet idea. Too bad I have no idea what to do for my mom. It was simple when I was living at home. Me and the sibs would go pick some springy flowers and make her a very classy breakfast in bed (even taking her order! haha). But now I'm not at home. I wasn't last year either. No idea what to do.

Well, my next project I'm working on is a cord bound book that I'm going to use some of my hand marbled paper and upcycled leather for. I tore apart a perfectly good coat from DI for the leather. I am a villain. More on my villainous ways next time.

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 :) ).

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.