A small experiment turned into a fun sketchbook-making project!
When making a gift for someone, I tend to do a few experiments beforehand to make sure I know the best way to tackle it, especially if I'm making something I've not made before. In this case, I was making a full leather-bound sketchbook for a friend of mine, but because I'd not used leather before ( noting that here I used faux leather which works quite differently to actual leather!) I wanted to see how I could go about doing what I had envisioned in my head.
And this sketchbook was made as part of this experiment, where I tested a new binding stitch and binding style!
Materials
Paper
Leather (a faux - PU - leather was used for this project)
Thread
Awl
Needle
Method
I started out by folding 25 A4 sheets of blank paper in half to create a 50-page text block (which consisted of five 5-sheet signatures):
Six holes were measured on the folds of the sheets and an awl was used to pierce through each individual page:
The chosen piece of leather was cut in a way that it wouldn't cover the entire book, as I mainly wanted to test out the stitching in the spine, so I cut a piece that covered the whole spine and extended almost halfway over the front and back of the book cover:
I measured out the height of the pages and spine onto the inside of the leather, with extra spacing on the top and bottom to compensate for the cardboard cover I was going to glue the leather onto later:
The same holes in the folds of the sheets were also measured and poked through the leather with an awl:
A very wooly thread was used for the stitched binding of this sketchbook.
I started by tying a knot in the thread and thread it through the top right hole in the leather from the outside, then passed it through the top hole in one of the signatures and back through the second hole of both the paper and the leather:
Doing the same down to the bottom of the spine, moving to the left, coming up and then looping the needle and thread over and under the stitch from the right's side (excuse the poor image quality, my phone's camera doesn't work very well under indoor lighting at night!):
I did the same for the long stitch above it. The same went for the rest of the binding:
The finished stitching:
I didn't record the making of the actual hard cover of the sketchbook, but I shall telepathically send memory snapshots of the process to you whilst you read this...
So I had basically taken the dimensions of the text block, and measured those dimensions onto cardboard adding two centimetres to the length and a centimetre to the width (I did this for two pieces of cardboard).
I took some old fabric, cut and stuck it over the cardboard covers individually. I then painted over the fabric using the dry brush technique with acrylic paint.
As for attaching it to the actual book, I cut a rugged edge on the ends of the leather and glued the top of the cardboard pieces to the underside of the leather.
I thought a bit of interestingness (yes, that's a word! Interesting, hey?) could be achieved by adding some other stitching to the cover, but because I realised I was running out of time to finish the actual sketchbook for my friend, I only managed to make two of these stitching embellishments. You can see most of this in the final experimental sketchbook:
Aaaand this is the final sketchbook for my friend, which was a bit more simpler than the experimental one as I went slightly crazy with different techniques all at once:
Thank you for taking a gander!
Stick around for more book-making adventures!
Also, check out my other crafty adventures, which include embroidery, sculpting, painting and sketching!
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