Intermediate Bookbinding: Week 9

This is a bitter sweet post because this past week was the ninth, and final, week of my Intermediate Bookbinding course. Sigh. After nine weeks you can't help but become friends with your classmates and instructor and, while one never needs an excuse to make a book, it's always nice to have a designated time to get your binding action on. 
Here's the wrap up of the final week:

Ready, set, go!

Checking to make sure my boards fit my book--they did.

I was temporarily single (just kidding Charlie). Because any metal can potentially damage the leather when you're working it, I had to remove my rings.

Before gluing, I had to mark where the boards would go on the leather and where the corners would be.

Then I literally cut corners...hahaha

After gluing the leather and boards together there was weighting, and waiting.

While we were waiting for the paste and leather to dry, we got a very basic blind tooling intro and a little practice in. It's fun but I definitely need more classes to perfect this skill.

Before tooling the real cover, I marked and trimmed the turn-ins.

Leather books are cased in using wheat paste, which isn't as tacky as other adhesives, like PVA, so we used Ace bandages to hold the covers tight over the book while the paste dried.

Voila! A finished book! And...

My Bookbinding certificate, I'm so proud of myself!