Creative Bookbinding Class

Last week we had to prepare a piece of leather for a cross structure binding we are doing in a few weeks, but as usual I could not find the piece of leather I thought I had so decided in the interim I would use either a piece of pelmet vilene or some felted blanket I had dyed some time ago.

I cut out my pelmet vilene and painted it (as instructed in Lynda Monk's book).  Applied some Bondaweb and then gold foil, followed by tissue paper.  It looked awful and I could not get the colour to come through the tissue paper to the surface.  What to do .... I added some black Misty Fuse plus blue foil and then painted it again with a quinacrodine acrylic colour to hide the horrible tissue paper so it is better now but not perfect.

Sitting yesterday having a cup of coffee and rereading the article on how to do it, I suddenly realised I had not read the full instructions and had missed out a crucial part of the process.  Ah well .... something to try another day I suppose as I now have a piece I can use for my cross structure binding.

The cover for the cross structure binding also needs a piece of paper pasted to the inside so I had to rummage through all the rubbish bits I keep in a box and found an A3 paste paper piece which had been created using brusho.  Had to spray it with varnish to stabalise the brusho before pasting it to the back of my piece of dyed blanket.  It has now been trimmed to the correct size so will find out if it is suitable today.

As I had two pieces of blanket cut out I made a printed surface for the other one using a small print block I had purchased from Art Van Go some time ago and never used.  I overprinted it several times and am quite pleased with the result.  It has also been pasted to the fabric ready for making into a cross structure binding if it is suitable.  If not it will make a nice book cover for a stitched book.

On Thursday morning, (after a frantic plea on Monday to my friend Tim in Yorkshire) a wonderful piece of leather arrived in the post so that has now been cut out and prepared ready for the forthcoming lesson.  If al the pieces of fabric are okay I should end up with several books to give to friends.Today we are doing a reverse stab bound book, which I think I have done before.