Sunday, August 28, 2011

First Japanese Stab Bound Books

My next adventure in bookmaking was figuring out Japanese stab binding (I don't know if I really got it right, but I approximated it enough to work) to make some small notebook sized books for students in a class I taught at church to stitch and use in their scripture study.

These were the samples I came up with. I used manila file folders because I thought it would save some prep time (it would have a little bit) and glued some Italian paper to the fronts to spruce them up. The front covers curled, and I didn't like it, so when I bought supplies for the class, I picked out some nice card stock and folded and scored it by hand. The first one I made with the card stock curled as well, but in thinking about it I realized I could just stitch the decorative paper onto the cover with everything else and forget about gluing all together. Problem solved and less mess during my class :)

This is what the preparation looked like. I made enough covers and pages for 23, twenty page books. I used my new Japanese screw punch, which was incredibly helpful. Muscles I am not used to using were sore for days :)

Here are the two books I stitched during my class to show the attendees how to do it. It was fun to figure out and then to teach :)


2 comments:

Paige Taylor Evans said...

Have you taken a bookbinding class or are you just figuring these out on your own? Either way - they look amazing!

AES said...

Thanks!

I worked in the Book Repair Unit in the library at BYU oh so many years ago which gave me a great foundation (if I could just remember it all...) and then this past June I took a Coptic class from Karleigh Jae, which jump started me.

Since then I've been buying books about book binding and surfing the web trying to learn more. I really want to get better :)