Books!

To continue my book theme, here is a little blank book I finished for myself this weekend:

After seeing a post on Angrychicken.typepad.com, a craft blog I keep up with, about homemade books, I decided to make one of my own.

I cut two sturdy pieces of cardboard into two (roughly) 8X6" rectangles and covered them in painted packing paper. I also pasted a piece of contrasting paper on the inside to cover the folds and glue smears of the white paper. (Painted packing paper is one of my best discoveries. I have a huge box of these sheets that I just paint up with acrylic paints. You can get custom sized sheets of paper in any color your heart desires!) I cut a bundle of sketch paper to fit the cardboard (10 pieces, folded in half for twenty pages), and used another piece as an inside binding to attach the rest of the paper to by gluing it (the binding paper) to the outsides of the cardboard covers leaving a 1/4" space between them. In retrospect, I should have left more than a 1/4" because my book won't close properly, but oh well.

After I glued the functioning binding (to be covered with the green so the stitches won't show), I used an awl to punch holes through all the layers of paper to create holes to sew it together with. I sewed it all up with some nice heavy duty thread that felt like it was waxed. Perhaps I'll use a lighter color next time... :-P Now, in the post she said that she just uses a sewing machine for hers, but I realized that my book was not going to fit in the sewing machine, and I wasn't sure it could handle 11 sheets of paper at a time, so I just sewed it all by hand, which actually worked really well. I think I would use a heavier paper for the functioning binding though. Also, the painted packing paper was not a good idea, it gets scuffed and torn way too easy. I might use card stock of scrap booking paper next time.