this blog is essentially an online diary of my little creative projects - if you can't fix it, throw some glitter over it and add a lacy edge and everything will be alright.

Monday 25 March 2013

coptic/exposed tape book binding!

hello again! it's been a while but i'm back and full of crafty ideas and ambitions : ) one of which is to get really good at book binding....partly because i am prone to parting with quite a lot of money when i spy a pretty notebook, but mostly because i saw some really cool ones on folksy.

my fist attempt was just to get my head around the basic stitching, which i can only describe as being something between embroidery chain stitch and and a crochet chain. there are already lots of good tutorials, youtube videos etc. online explaining how it works (here's good), they all make it look and sound far more complicated than it is, just stick with it a bit and you'll be fine. my first one looks like this:


(please excuse the chipped nail polish!)

it went quite well so i am rather pleased, however i did make a few mistakes - i made the covers the same size as the pages...so they're a tad too small really, also, the card i used was quite thin, which resulted in it having a slightly less-than-professional feel to it. but the fabric i covered it with is cool so that kind of makes up for it:


also, not having a guillotine meant that it took a while to sort the pages, and that when they were folded into groups, the pages stuck out more towards the centre of each grouping than at the edges. this lead to my second attempt, which involved larger, stiffer covers and a quick borrow of my work's guillotine:


it's square, black, has black pages and incorporates velvet ribbon in the spine. the tape method here involves laying a piece of ribbon across the spines of your pages, doing a large stitch over it for a few spines, once you've done 3 or 4, the next one you use to tie the others together to make a sort of cluster....ok, my descriptive abilities are not on top form today. it looks like this:


to be honest, so long as the holes you've pierced in your pages all line up, you could do any kind of stitching and it'll probably look quite good. plus it's fun, fairly cheap as far as crafts go, and you end up with an almost gender-neutral and useful thing to keep or give : )

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