Using
Jane Davies' instructions found
here I spent this weekend making my first home-made sketchbook.
It's a brilliant way to use up random pieces of paper and gets you over the hurdle of not wanting to ruin a beautiful new art-shop sketchbook.
I used cartridge paper as the basis for each signature, cut to roughly A4 size
and then had a lovely time digging out maps, glassine, overhead transparencies, lokta, onion skin and fabric in various shapes and sizes.
I used mat-board for the covers and a strip of heavy lokta for the spine. The lovely green and red on the covers is Japanese paper from the stash.
The signatures are stitched to the cover with waxed linen thread: one of the reasons I chose this method was not needing to glue the signatures. Jane's tutorial is very straightforward and easy to follow: I already have the papers cut for my next sketchbook.
If you decide to give it a go I would really encourage you to have a proper bone folder and an awl, and be really careful in measuring and double checking everything, before you cut, glue, or bore holes. And using paper clips to hold the signature folios together while you're stitching, especially if your folios are not a uniform size.
3 comments:
hurrah! this looks like a great sketchbook, and it is the best to work on your own pages.
Good advice - measure twice, saw once - and of course every "proper" book maker needs a bone folder, it's so nice to use!
This is making me think it would be so interesting to experiment with glassine etc etc in a sketchbook. Certainly there are many odds&ends of paper stashed away.
What size book did you finish up with?
It's a bit bigger than A4 - the cartridge paper folios are roughly A4 size but all the other bits (glassine, transparency, fabric etc) are of wildly different sizes
I was thinking of you and Velma a LOT when I was making this so it's lovely to have comments from both of you xx
Post a Comment