This spring someone gave me a book of leather samples – I’m not sure where they are from, maybe an upholsterer – but they came in two shades of brown and a beautiful bright red. I had four peices total, of really nice quality fairly thick leather, and I was trying to think of what I could make with them.
I had been practicing my longstitch from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Bindings Vol. 1 (a really great resource) and thought that if I cut the leather in half vertically I could make some great pocket sized leather journals.
I filled the journals with Frankfurt Zerkall paper, a mixture of cotton and high alpha cellulose paper with a deckled edge. It has a nice sort of rough feel, and a soft creamy white color. I tore the paper by hand to keep the deckled look. Interleaved in the pages are pieces of joss paper, neat looking fake money from China, which is burned during funerals to give the spirit of the deceased money for the afterlife.
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Leave a Reply to Awesome Handmade Books: Long Stitch Bookbinding « In the Studio
4 Comments
[…] a little step-by-step long stitch bookbinding tutorial that I made a couple years ago (I should revamp and re-release […]
Beautiful books!! Can I bind individual pages (ie. not folded) into a hand stitched
book, either of leather like your illustrations, or Japanese style/stab stitch??
Thank you,
Gina
Hi Gina! Japanese stab stitch would work better, since you need folded pages to complete the sewing of a long stitch journal – look up “Sea Lemon Bookbinding” on youtube for great tutorials
What a beautiful design! I wish you were more in depth with your tutorial, though. It hints at how to do this, but is not very in depth. I will study it and try to decipher it! Thanks so much for being willing to share some of your secrets to those of us just starting out!