Forgive my fairly rough images below: I wanted to share a great bookbinding technique, but I’ve only made maquettes using it so far. I’ve got a proper book in progress, but it’s a joint venture, and may take months yet!

The Canberra Bookbinders’ Guild has started a website, and if you head over there you’ll find the seeds of what it going to be a very valuable book resource. Their section on ‘Workshop Notes’ has (to date) two very clear book stitch tutorials: single sheet coptic, and figure-of-eight stitch. This latter one is marvellous for making flippy books using heavy cardboard, slide mounts, or even, as I’m showing here, CDs and other such materials. It binds the single sections together — the sections do need to be thick and/or stiff — yet allows them to be flexible, bending easily both ways.

Here you can see I’ve made a maquette using those clear CDs you get at the bottom of a spindle, but real CDs work well, and snap cleanly through if you score them heavily with a stanley knife and metal ruler. I’ve used a very heavy waxed linen thread, but you could use wire, fishing line, heavy wool, anything that can withstand a bit of friction over time.

I’ve seen a fabulous little book using this technique which had a map laminated onto square and triangular sections of thick card, and the book pieces follow the line of the coast in the map, and the whole book is able to fold up into a small square.

The Guild has plans to expand their online tutorials, so keep checking back there occasionally. If you’re in Canberra and are interested in bookbinding of all types, come along to a meeting. Lots of techniques are shared and encouraged.

Happy making!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 7:58 pm and is filed under paper+mixed media+book arts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.