Alchemy!

 The blue end papers are not this blue in person.

The blue flowers outlined with yellow don't look as clean/sharp as the others for some reason.

 

Here's some of the work that went into warming up my foil pressing skills, trying out another method of transferring the graphic, etc.

 This is the alternative transfer method I mentioned above. It's called photocopy transfer. I wasn't sure how well it would work, but I had extra fabric, so I thought I would try it out, for experimentation's sake. As you can see, it isn't the clearest method of transfer, but it's nice to know it works like this.

I cut out a couple of the best practice pieces to test out placement.

 Fun :)

Scrapbook... no, wait...

This is my "Scrap" book. See, I got these lovely fabrics at the Deseret Industries a while back, and I've been thinking for a while how lovely they look together. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think they're a great combo. So I've been trying to think of a beautiful way to use them all together, and couldn't think of anything. Except this, and I'm not sure it if counts as beautiful.

You may recognize the pink fabric from my Mother's day book. All of the fabric for this book was made into book cloth by me. I especially love the beige fabric (the lowest part of the book in the first picture), because it reminds me of 80's prom dresses that you find at thrift stores. You know, the silk moire that looks like wood grain? It's classic. I actually picked up a couple more colors the other day (yeehaw!).

You can see in the picture below that some of the pages are different sizes. It gives the book a more handmade feel, and gives me an opportunity to give all those poor lost scraps of paper a home. They are all very similar in size, and it doesn't harm the strength of the book (or the aesthetic, for that matter).

 I'm happy with the result. The thread is a nice minty green that goes rather smashingly with the blue floral print. On the inside covers I used some rescued dusty pink lokta paper. I can't believe what some people will try to throw away. And at the same time, I can't believe some of the stuff I try to keep, haha sigh.

Check the book out on my Etsy site.

Butterscotch

This is a traditional style coptic stitch book I made yesterday. I'm especially excited about this one because it is covered with some of my very own homemade book cloth! Yay! It's actually the same stuff that you can see me make in my video tutorial, here.

I love all the beautiful colors that are in this fabric. It has every color of the rainbow except for green. That was nice, because it left a lot of options open for end paper. I decided on a beautiful butterscotch colored lokta paper, which is almost the same color as the thread. I think it goes nicely with the plaid fabric.

I did switch it up a little with this one by alternating how far onto the book board the stitches go. You can see it in the next picture. Overall, this was a fun book to make, and it was a lot quicker to do normal style. Coming up with variation patterns is hard for me. It takes a while to decide what will look best, and then there's the whole process of poking holes in each signature without the help of a universal template. Grr.

Crocodile Rock!

Here is a book I've been planning to do for a while. I had covered some book board a while back with then intent of doing another crazy coptic stitch. The paper was the inspiration. How could I use this paper and not do something slightly crazy with the book?

Like any good coptic book should, this one lies open flat easily, but unlike my other coptic book, it doesn't try to fly open. The inside paper on the covers is a beautiful dark chocolate lokta paper, and the thread is brown as well. I love the feeling of lokta paper.

The paper I used to cover the boards on the outside is recycled paper screen printed in Zimbabwe. I love the print, but I found the paper to be a little difficult to work with. It was a little thinner than I was expecting, so it wrinkled and bubbled easily when I glued it down to the book board. I managed, and I'm sure I'll do better next time I use it, but it caught me off guard the first time.

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.