Bookbinding with Heather Dewick

I went along to a Bookbinding workshop ran by Heather Dewick at Debbie Bryan's Studio. It was a great day punching, cutting, sewing and making (plus excellent chocolate brownies to keep us going!) We made a soft back medieval-type book with leather wrap around fastening.

Here's my book!

and in detail

Now lets look at the process....

we started by folding our paper...

taking an A1 sheet we folded it with the grain in half, cut it along the fold, then in half again. 

Then we slice down the fold 2/3 of the way

then folding over again we get this

an A1 sheet makes 8 of these sections

Then we're ready for marking out the cover! 

there was lots of leather to choose from...I chose a green goat skin, with complimentary brown fastening.

on the reverse of your chosen cover, place 1 of the paper sections on the front of the book cover and mark out guidelines for where you need to sew

using a ruler mark out 2 outer and 1 inner section

repeat guidelines until you have a grid

following the guides punch holes through the leather with a braddle tool, these will make it much easier to sew!

turn it over and you will have created this!

Next, mark out the equivalent holes in the pages. It can be useful to have a rule guide for this..

make sure you have all the folded 'tops' of the page sections in the same direction.
mark this side of the stack to keep you in check!

Now you're ready to get constructing!

lay your piece of leather out with what will be the front of the book facing you

starting at the guideline furthest away, place the paper section down and sew through following the guideholes

you are looking to create this type of effect on the spine. the larger sections on this example have been woven, you can embelish, or leave plain and simple, it's up to you!

as you are sewing, you may run out of thread! To knot on to the existing thread, loop the new thread around your finger

and pull it through. Pull this tight onto the old thread and carry on sewing

Once all the page sections have been attached it's then deciding how you want your wraparound

I really liked this one of Heather's

we looked at some other examples and I thought this one was great too!

We also talked about other methods and had a go at some Japanese binding 

looking at examples I really likes the simplicity of this one

and the ingenuity of the postcards used here!

I had been collecting envelopes ever since Claire told me about a  book she'd seen once made out of them so I had a go with the Japanese bind on them here! It's a bit crude if I'm honest but to experiment with the process this worked just fine

Heather also showed us a way of folding a single sheet of paper to create a book without the need for a cover!

Heather will be part of the Open Studios event at Persistence Works in Sheffield 18th/19th/20th November. I'll be off to have a look!