Random Musings

Focus has always been an issue with this blog–but I think I will commandeer it—for something I hope to be doing more of.  For the past few years, one of the reliefs in my life has been to be extremely analog–and hand bind books; start from string and paper and board—and come up with something that is much more permanent than a file or folder; more concrete and, I hope, more permanent.  I’ve taken lots of bookbinding classes in the last few years and the examples you see below are mostly my interpretations of what I’ve learned from Cami at Angela’s Happy Stamper in Reston.

• The brown book is a leather binding with a custom-colored frontspiece made of very heavy water-color paper to give the book some structure under the soft leather.  The grommet design on the front is mine, the stitching on the spine I learned from Cami.
• The white book is done with “secret Belgian binding”–the colorful design is my own–to celebrate a wonderful little girl.  There are random inner pockets from pink heart papers.
• The blue one is Cami’s design for a “perfect pocket journal” with a two-fold cover that totally encloses the signatures;  I chose to add the beading to the stitching
• The red journal had a leather spine with paper book covers and a harlequin stitch pattern on the spine;  again, I learned the stitch pattern from Cami but chose to add the beads.  The embellishment on the front is a Tim Horton piece.

Apologies for the quality of the images–but I took the pix very fast as I was on my way out the door to take these journals to their new owners.