Wine Colored Mountains

More wedding presents-heh. These covers are different kinds of fancy paper that were all dyed in the same wine (leftover). The different kinds of paper soaked in the wine differently creating very different colors. Natural tearing creates a cragged mountain like edge which layered up creates the above. The back cover was also wine dyed. The base of the front was a printmaker's blue ink and the whole thing is sealed in homemade modge podge. I, of course, bound it with a zig zag coptic binding.

Peacocks and Music

 The cover is triple layered to create a dimensional effect to the peacocks (the blue is a lower layer). The background is tea stained and the rest hand inked. This was a wedding present so it takes its cue from the theme. Both the groom and bride are musicians so I thought it was an appropriate poem.

 This is a rare closed spine book for me. It's 3 3 signature bindings set into the same spine but I set one of them (the green one) upside down to really overlap the bindings.

The interior pages are quality paper and the end papers are the rest of the poem by O'Shaughnessy.

"the treasure of a honeymoon"

So my cousin got married and I couldn't go. I decided instead, I had to do a present. As I'm poor, I couldn't get them something off their register or whatever so instead I made them a book.

It's meant as a scrapbook for the honeymoon. The moon and star stab bindings are golden to evoke a "honeymoon" literally. There are real constellations in there though the moon is definitely not in the right place. It's 8x10 with a glittery dark blue cover. The star stab binding is another of Becca's designs. The binding has accordion folds to allow the book to expand. That means you can paste stuff on the pages and it won't turn into

overburdened binding

If a stab binding becomes overburdened, it breaks. Most bindings will break eventually (the above spiral binding included) but stab bindings are particularly inflexible and might crack off in the first month of being overburdened. (Yes, I know this from experience.)

To accompany the honeymoon was this map.

This map of Greece (where their honeymoon was) is hand drawn with dip pen & brown ink. Certain islands are labeled as is Athens and Thessaloniki and it is fairly accurate to a Mercator projection. Along all the coast lines are woodcut-esque lines to make it seem old fashioned and particularly hand drawn. I know not everyone is as into documenting their geography and making story maps as I am but I think my cousin is the sort to appreciate it.

Don't Let Your Mind Bully Your Body

You'll remember that the last book I posted on here was kind of a stab binding hot mess despite the complete awesomeness of the binding. I had indirectly discovered Becca Hirsbrunner's blog with her organic bindings through incomplete sources and just got too excited to be too precise. Well, here's another of her designs but this time I made it with my more typical forethought.

This time I used Becca's tutorial except that I wanted the binding to take up less of the text block so I eliminated one on each side to make the whole binding 4 holes deep instead of 5. This got rid of one of the nice weaved lines but I think it remains elegant.

I had tension problems due to waxing my thread so the spine wraps are not properly horizontal but since I hadn't made this before I didn't want to make them too tight that I'd be weaving furrows into the cover (I've done this before with a different binding).

Pretty much, I love it. This is a little book with a sharpied cover with that elegant binding that comes to a knot at the center.

Bones

I haven't made an entire, more-than-one-signature in over a year now but happily, it was like I'd never stopped! Apparently, I won't lose my bookmaking skills despite no practice. It might be because while I don't make books nowadays, I do think about making them and it was a very complicated dream in which I made a Belgian Secret Binding that made me finally make this book. It's for my master's dissertation adviser and really I ought to have given it to him back in January or February. Unfortunately, this is typical-I can go years without giving gifts out and then suddenly, really randomly, I make up for it.
Anyhow, onto the book itself!

my adviser is an archaeozoologist and though I am not, I nonetheless have the Collins bone id guide from which I traced these bones in order to cut them out of the greenish/blueish cover paper. The bones expose a light green brocade paper underneath. It's a slightly odd sized square.

the end paper is a British bought paper and was chosen b/c I admire his very methodical approaches to archaeological problems and this strikes me as a very methodical paper.

I was stymied on what binding the book wanted and ended up with my coptic zigzag-partially b/c I love it and partially b/c it put me in mind of the jagged ends of broken bones...which is what an archaeologist usually sees

Night Sky

doubled over twisted link and kettle

Let's Just Make It Work

would work well as a budget book cover methinks

doubled over twisted link and kettle

Trees in the wind

made with a friend, this is a closed spine book with various layered 3 signature bindings

it's nice end paper, no?

Angles

cover is this stunning iridescent paper

coptic modified into angles

Ideal Spanish Lady

cover is a redrawing from a 1932 Spanish magazine cover with the Neruda quote: "Zumbando entre los arboles, orquestral y divino"

binding is a coptic with off set, modified center stitches

Folk Musician

cover drawn on tracing paper then glued down

a slight variation on the zig zag coptic variation

blue flower embedded front sheet

blue papers mixed in

Fretboard

a present for a guitarist friend's birthday. Since the only drawing things I have are apparently water based which inevitably smears upon application of the matte medium I use to seal off my covers, I lit on the idea of drawing it on tracing paper and then simply gluing the drawn side to the cover. simple innovation that erases all that frustration!

binding is a twisted link and kettle with doubled over variation

Icarus

heavily modified coptic

Series- Webs

a little petite double 3 signature book


simple bindings, modified leather and pamphlet bindings

Series- Watch Out

3 covers ended up this way. One was already posted, another a coptic variation, and the last a twisted link and kettle.

Hide and Seek, Final

I originally posted this as my teaching book for the 3 signature binding. However, when it came time to give it away as a gift, I felt like it needed more. Like, more signatures and a more interesting (for me) binding so here is the final result.

Watch Out

My latest books are slightly different from my usual books for the simple reason that I have none of my book-making kit and am improvising while on my dig.

Zig zag variation on single needle coptic.

Heraldic

cut out to show striped (recycled newspaper) paper

binding is doubled twisted link and kettle
intended as a gift

Tile

Cut out cover. Design comes from a rather popular design for medieval tiles.

Binding is twisted link and kettle, doubled over with thread shift
created as a gift.

Masculine

cover

binding is some more double coptic modified into chevrons

Strange name for the book maybe, but it refers to my mother and grandmother's responses to the cover which was originally made as a gift to my godmother. It was rejected as too masculine and I had to make a different book for my godmother. I was entirely nonplussed by the judgement.