Inventory sale!

Over the last few years, I have taught a lot of bookbinding classes. Every time I teach a class, I make samples of the books beforehand and then make them again during the workshop. As such, I have accumulated a pile of books that are starting to create a storage problem. And I really need only one or two samples of any particular binding.

So -- I have just listed 25 books in my etsy shop. They are all at least half price, and I'm offering FREE shipping to Canada and USA. If you ever wanted a nice handmade book, here's your chance! Or if you are one of my bookbinding or marbling friends and you think you might like to trade something, I am totally up for that!

Follow this link to see all the books on sale: https://tinyurl.com/25handmadebooks.

A Japanese Account Book

The very first bookbinding book that I got, was the "Japanese Bookbinding" book by Ikegami. I was entirely impressed with all the history included in this book and I read every word and made every project. One of my favorite notebook structures from this book is this simple account book structure. This structure is called daifuku chō and it was used during the Edo period (1603-1868) for travel diaries, guest registers, and primarily as merchant account books (Ikegami p.68). Ikegami includes a photograph of an account book from the mid-1800s and that always catches my attention when I go through his book.

So a while back, I decided that I would try to replicate the "look" of that mid-1800s current-accounts book. The first thing I had to do, was figure out how to recreate the Japanese calligraphy. Since I'm not a calligrapher, and know nothing of Japanese writing at all, I had to figure out something that I could manage. So I carved some rubber stamps to recreate the Japanese characters on the cover.

I really don't know what they mean. Ikegami's text suggests that they would embellish the cover with the characters for "great fortune" but I don't know if this example follows that trend. I did speak to someone who knew a bit more than I, and she believed that the character on the bottom was the character for "account book." If any of my readers can enlighten me about the others, I'd love to hear from you!

Once I had my Japanese character stamps ready, I stamped them onto some cream handmade paper and added some little hand-drawn characters as well. The cover paper and the pages were then aged, and then I bound the books together using linen twine.

There is a long braided piece extending from the spine at the top of the book. Ikegami writes that completed ledgers might have been strung together and tied to a long cord so that in case of an emergency, such as a fire, the merchant could easily grab all his account books at once and toss them to safety.

Moving on...

Remember that stack of text blocks? They are finished. Phew. Moving on to new things now.

Stacked up

Apologies for the blogging drought. This is all that I have to show for it right now...fifty-five textblocks and 110 cover boards for a set of books that need to be finished in the next couple weeks...

Hoping to wrap up this project soon so I can move onto even more fun things!

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.

Summer Journals

It seems that Summer has finally arrived here - we had a very slow start and even yet, I'm not convinced that the Spring weather has truly vanished. In anticipation of the season, I have been making some fun summer journals...which just means they are a bit more colourful than others! Halifax recently had Bike Week to kick off the bike season. So I carved a bicycle rubber stamp and made some notebooks. We were there watching these guy race and my kid zoomed around on his tricycle. I had the bicycle stamp with me and gave the kids bike tattoos too. I've done a bunch of leather and suede journals too, lots of summer here. Including two of my "margarita journals" in Blue Curacao and Green Iguana! The leather and suede books all have a rainbow of pages inside, using seven different colours of paper. This one is a lemon-lime suede mini book: Here's to some real Summer days!