Bookbinding Update | Week 18
Bookbinding Update | Week 17
C&G Week 16 | Packed Sewing
Yesterday I was learning about ‘packed sewing’, this is another form of sewing, which dates back to the middle/dark ages. It was used for binding vellum and parchment and all those old forms of paper, the reason being this type of paper would expand at the fore-edge of the book (the bit opposite the spine), the packed sewing would ‘pack’ the thread together at the spine, therefore expanding the spine in compensation for the expanded fore-edge, making the book more square shaped rather than wedged!
All very interesting I thought – the one above is a practice and I have not ‘packed’ it out enough. This colourful one I have made at home and made it a lot bigger – very pretty!
C&G Week 15 | Casing-in a flat back binding
Yesterday was a good day, we didn’t have the board to start the slip cases, so the evening was a catch up evening – giving me the chance to finish my Flat back binding, which I managed and is now complete. This was the one I sent an image of some time back showing the card and the pink cloth on the spine and corners.
Well to finish it, I covered it in paper which I had made from the art part of the course, and then had to ‘case it in’. This you have to do fairly quickly – its covering the end paper with glue and sticking the text block onto the boards. This however is also the part which most easily goes wrong. Unfortunately due to it being the VERY last thing you do, it is also the most disastrous if it DOES go wrong, as you have to start from scratch! Things that could go wrong would be the skew-whiffing of the text block and misaligning it completely, or possibly over gluing, which might mean the covers bend or the glue seeps through the end-paper, or you don’t dry it properly and it goes through the rest of the book, as C&Ds did. All of which you can do nothing about! Luckily, this was my most successful gluing yet, and I am thrilled to bits!
C&G Week 14 | Lacing onto limp boards
So I didn’t get an awful lot done on Tuesday, I had a bit of a panic that it would all go wrong – lack of confidence – however, I managed to overcome it in the end and get going again, perhaps it was first day jitters! It seems the further you go on a book, the more is at stake, one thing could easily go wrong!
The first ribbons are now laced so the cover is not going anywhere. For the rest of the lacing I was thinking of some sort of checker board with voids, but I’m not entirely sure how to do it. We start the slip case next week which is quite exciting!