A Paper Daybook

I decided to get the long weekend started out right, with a bookmaking workshop. Our fearless leader was none other than Juliayn Coleman of Book Island Bindery and my classmates included Kate, a friend from my binding certificate program, and Courtney Cerruti of Paper Musings. What was the class, you ask? Upcycled Daybook, of course. 
The task before us at the beginning of the day was to disbind a book, add new pages, including calendar pages, and then rebind the pages using the original front and back cover into a daybook for 2013. Challenging but also oh so much fun!

Our books were childrens' books. Mine was a biology book called Your Wonderful Body.

The old pages were mixed with pages from other unbound books, and also National Geographic pages. I, of course, chose the dinosaur ones.

We punched new holes and, since these books were going to have spines thicker than the originals, we sewed on tapes for extra support. I got a little excited about all the pages I could include and ended up with 19 signatures! I was really glad to sew on tapes.

To make the cover, we cut into the old front and back cover boards so that the spine cloth could be tucked inside and create a smooth transition from old cover parts to the new ones.

Then we cased in and had our daybooks! Now, I admit, I use my iPhone calendar all the time, at work I'm addicted to GoogleCal, and my daybook is pretty large and a bit unwieldy to be carrying around all the time. Still, after the first 2 days of living with it, I'm enchanted. I'm still in the process of adding all the dates, but it's nice to be writing by hand. I have a really busy spring and, aside from appointments, I've added my to-do list for the past two days and it lowered my stress to see everything in a list and to be able to cross things off, in the 'real world'. So all you digital crazed folks, go get yourself a daybook, or, better yet, make one.

Intermediate Bookbinding: Week 5

Turns out my new nail color matches the spine of my round back book!

I'm running a week behind on the bookbinding posts; I hope to catch up over the weekend. Week 5 was last week and it was all about finishing and deconstructing. 

First, we had to finish our rounded spine books:

Not much left to do, just cover the front and back covers and paste down the end sheets inside.

First the spine cloth had to be trimmed back so that it was covering 'exactly' one fifth of the cover on both the front and back.

Grey cover cloth on. I don't have a picture to show but, the shirt I wore this day was the exact same color scheme (I didn't plan it, I swear!).

Then it was time to trim the fold overs on the inside covers so they would look even underneath the pasted down end sheets.

Tadaa! All done!

Once our first books were complete, it was time to disbind old books so we could prep them for re-sewing and re-binding:

I chose 2 small Shakespeares that I will bind as one volume.

After detaching the old covers, we had to coat the spines to loosen up the old glue.

Then you scrape the old glue off, yuck!

Mostly glue free signatures

There was a minor tragedy with this folio, when I separated the signatures, this folio tore. But don't worry, I was able to repair it this week (week 6).