Repurposing materials for bookbinding

A while back, I asked Pegg, fiveforty.etsy.com, to help me come up with some ideas for making books with repurposed materials. Pegg is a weaver, and so she wove two book covers for me to play with. This first one is woven plastic - this is the kind of plastic that comes wrapped around products at grocery stores before they are unpacked and shelved. Pegg collected the plastic at her local grocery store, took it home and wove it on her loom. Then I used it to make a photo album. Pegg also made another one for me, using lotto tickets. She cut them into strips, stitched them, then wove them together to make this book cover. It made a very sturdy book cover and I was able to case in a text block (consisting mostly of reclaimed papers in reds and blues) and have a wrap around cover with a button closure. Thanks for working with me on these projects Pegg! Check out Pegg's recycled textile rugs, woven using pre-used sweaters, t-shirts, jeans, etc in her Etsy shop, atFiveForty.Etsy.com.

Twined Binding

The "twinded binding" was devised by Roberta Lavadour and she explains it in detail in The Bonefolder, Vol 4 No 2. This image to the right, shows a stack of Roberta's twined spines. Using multiple thread colours, the twining can make whatever grid pattern you have the patience to create.

Twining is a basket weaving technique and as Roberta states in her article, "the basic twining technique itself was and is used by many cultures in North and Central America, the Middle East and New Zealand in the fabrication of everything from tapestries to sandals." She incorporated the technique into her work and created this binding for the 2007 Guild of Book Workers Standards of Excellance Conference. She has done some incredibly intricate and gorgeous books using this technique.

The following is my first attempt at the twined binding, resulting in quite a plain checkerboard pattern, which seemed quite complicated for my first go! I used limp leather for the cover material rather than making a hardcover as she suggests in her article. But I do really like how the back cover is woven, which allowed me to continue the twining on the fore edge wrap-around, and two of the long straps are long enough to be used as a closure, extending around to the buttons on the front cover. This technique definitely requires some practice!

This type of binding was included in the 2008 Bind-o-rama, so you can see some better examples and more of Roberta's books in The Bonefolder, Vol 4 No 2.

Weaving my book

Thanks to Jackie, TJBookarts, I tried weaving some leather. She is having a weekly challenge and this week the theme was "scraps." So when I investigated my leather scrap boxes, I discovered that I had a lot of long narrow strips of leather in there. So, I thought maybe I could weave them.

My experience with weaving is limited to the little paper baskets we made in grade one for Easter. So that is all the knowledge I had to work with here. Initially I thought perhaps it would make a nice placemat.


I secured and trimmed the edges.


I didn't do anything else to it, most of the leather that I used was a bit thick. So I just sewed directly through the cover to attach the signatures. I think a woven mat like this could be used to cover a hardcover book if it was made with much thinner leather strips. I'm not very good at paring so I'm going to start saving thinner strips. I've added that idea to my list of future projects to do as soon as I have some time.