I was watching a bunch of Jimmy Diresta’s videos on Youtube and came across one where he makes a book. As I watched the video I was thinking, “I can totally do this, and people use books every day.” After a little bit of research, I stumbled upon sealemon’s series of videos on book binding that have really clear instructions and suggestions on what materials to use. On a little bit of a whim, I went to Jerry’s Artarama and they had almost everything I need to make a book.
I followed the sea lemon’s instructions in the following videos:
- How to Make a Text Block
- Kettle Stitch Binding
- How to Make Book Cloth
- How to Make a Hardcover Book: Case Binding
The only thing that I did differently was the size of paper (and the resulting book size) that I used. In the tutorials, sea lemon uses standard letter paper, which makes a standard Moleskin size notebook. I am not the largest fan of small notebooks, and I really like to have plenty of rooms to make notes around sketches, so I decided to make a larger book. At Jerry’s, I found 11″ x 17″ graph paper, which once it was folded in half made 8.5″ x 11″ pages. This gives me plenty of room for sketches and notes, plus it is graph paper!
Putting the book together was a little more time consuming that I had originally thought it would be. Folding the paper (80 sheets), poking holes with a needle awl, and stitching the pages together took me a couple of evenings of work. The hardest part of these steps was keeping everything aligned while stitching. One of the tools that I didn’t have that was recommended was a book press of some sort. I scrounged around my Dad’s garage and found 2 pieces of plywood and a couple of clamps that I turned into a make shift “book press”. I will say that it was a little awkward to set up and move around, but it did the job.
Once the text block was complete, I dragged #The_Wookie to Joann’s* to pick up the suggested materials for the book cloth. I picked out a beige linen material for the cover, as well as the orange ribbon that is used for the bookmark. During the sea lemon’s video on making book cloth she mentions that not all fabrics need the adhesive layer and tissue paper added to work. I debated not doing these steps, but I am glad that I did. The linen material that I pick out is not “dimensionally stable” aka engineering speak for “it stretches and doesn’t spring back”. Adding the backing material, helped with the material hold its shape. In addition, the adhesive layer also sealed the fabric to prevent the glue from seeping through.
I am really happy with the finished product. I have been using it for a week now and it has not fallen apart yet. Of all all of the “10 things” projects that I have completed so far, this project has had the best reward/work ratio.
* And by “dragged”, I mean that I just mentioned that “I needed to stop by some time in the near future”. We were at the store within the hour.
