Monday, October 10, 2011

Unfinished Project #1

I have shelves full of unfinished projects! Sound familiar? With a bit of extra time this weekend, I decided to finish some of them.

About a year ago, I made several books for someone who needed them to be a particular size and style. They all had plain covers made from Saint-Armand paper - here's a stack of the blue ones from that project:


There were also some done in red, navy, brown, and green.

While I was making these books, I made three covers that were the wrong size. Remember, measure twice, cut once! It's good advice. If I'd been more careful, I wouldn't have had three covers that didn't fit the contents. But - I did. I laid the extra covers on the shelf with the intention of using them for something... later. Later finally happened. It was awkward getting started, since normally I made the textblock first and then make a cover to fit it. This time, I was working from the other direction - the covers were ready and I had to make a textblock to fit into them.

The extra covers have been transformed into three blank notebooks, and the plain covers have been spiced up with some of my hand-marbled shipping tags and labels. The covers are made with turn-ins so they are quite strong. The binding on these notebooks is the "longstitch through a slotted cover" sewing.



Available on Etsy, of course.
One unfinished project finished... many more to go.

4 comments:

Lizzie said...

Ooh great books! I like that longstitch binding style. May I show it on a post in my blog sometime soon? I'm doing a "layman's guide" series of posts about different book binding styles.

My favourite is the turquoisey one... but I love the others too!
The hand-marbled tag-lables make these very special.

I'm dealing with UFO's just now too - I cut lots of pages, but no covers, so now I'm making up the covers / books. I spend Friday making batches of bookcloth and cutting boards. Tomorrow, the hard work starts!!

Cynthia said...

Gorgeous colors!! I love the tags--just beautiful!

Cynthia Schelzig said...

Wonderful finish....fabulous books!

MyHandboundBooks said...

thanks Lizzie, Cynthia, and Cynthia :)