Book #045 - an Unwoven Longstitch

A tidier take on a longstitch. I made the spine first, separate from the rest of the book. As you can see it has five rows of holes (for five bundles of pages - aka "signatures") and six holes each. The holes show up better on this side of the cardboard, which was cut from a used Priority Mail box, but on the other side are all the measuring lines and marks. They show up further down the page. I used the finished spine to locate the holes on each signature, marked with a pencil then poked with a pushpin. When everything had all its holes it was an easy matter to stitch them together. (Remember Sewing Cards?)




The thread broke once, that was a nuisance but I just un-sewed it a bit and tied on an extension; you can see the knot. All the pages were neatly attached to a sturdy spine, ready to be joined to a cover of some sort. Now, the beauty of doing things this way is that the structure of the book is established and you can make the cover out of any number of sensible to ridiculous things - it's just there to protect the pages, not to support the book in any way. You can just glue it into a folded sheet of paper or card stock, as shown, or you could use fabric, or leather, or an interesting cover that you ripped off of an old book. You could glue the spine to the wall and never misplace the book.




There is one further refinement that would make the inside of the book look nicer; maybe that will be for tomorrow.

Book #044 - Woven Longstitch (Improvised)

Very 70s looking, n'est-ce pas? Reminiscent of all that macrame, which I actually wasn't into back then.

What's going on here is two things: first, a woven long stitch. This is simply a long running stitch that attaches the signatures to the spine of the book, basting it, as it were. See the red drawing below. After the basting is done you take the long leftover ends (leave some at the beginning) and weave them back and forth through the basting threads to make a nice, tidy woven decoration on the spine. At least that's what happens when you make the same number of very evenly spaced holes for each signature.

But who wants to do that when you can make different numbers of randomly-spaced holes and improvise a 70s-style macrame/woven/buttonhole-stitched spider web? That's the second thing. (See the blue drawing above.) Making things up as I go along is my idea of a good time, and this required a lot of that so I had a real good time! (So good that I went to bed exhausted and didn't post this until 12 hours later.)

The cover is just one folded piece of paper, the contrasting pieces were glued on later. This is a very simple style of book if you are comfortable with a hand sewing and improvisation.

Here's a picture of a very precise and beautiful (unwoven) longstitch binding, lest you feel that I'm setting a bad example for you. It is pretty, isn't it?

By the way - no matter how many or how crooked, you need an even number of holes in each signature.

Book #029

I wasn't feeling very inspired today, at least not where the book of the day was concerned. It was another good day in the studio, though. That was a happy thing.

This is a very basic sewn binding, it goes by a number of names. It's a running stitch - a simple in and out; at the end hole the thread comes out and jumps over to the next signature and goes in, and out, and in and out, and jump and in and out.....

And so on. The strip of gold paper was added at the last - slipped underneath those long stitches - and glued to the front and back. That's all the cover this one's going to get.