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.