Book #323

Accordion Album

Today's book is in recognition of the Chinese New Year. My five-year-old came home from school yesterday drawing cherry blossoms and dragons and informed me that I needed to make a book for the Chinese New Year. So this is what I did last night. I learned this accordion album from Gabrielle Fox's book The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books, which is a really thorough introductory book. I also had the pleasure of taking a class from Gabrielle a few years ago and she is a great teacher. I tweaked her accordion album structure a bit to incorporate a hardcover, but otherwise it is the same. As you can see, each of the pages has a different cherry blossom picture. The cherry blossoms on the third page were some that my daughter had drawn.

Binding Dimensions: Shape, Size & Structure

I have also just finished a class with Gabrielle Fox here at PBI, where we made a couple of books using a sewn binding. The first was made with a handmade paper cover and the second with a hardcover.


This book with the paper cover has blank pages and is sewn onto linen tapes, which are then laced in at the spine. The tapes have to be anchored, so I used buttons on there to make the anchor a bit more decorative.


The hardcover book has been sewn the same as the first book then we added a hollow tube on the spine and cased it into a hardcover, resulting in a very classic-looking hardcover book. This is actually a printed book of poetry by Reid Bush, called What We Know and it was printed by Larkspur Press. I decided to go with a full cloth covering, and I added a raised bird in flight on the front to reflect the imagery of the title poem.

One more class to complete!