{"id":19,"date":"2009-03-24T14:54:53","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T18:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/?p=19"},"modified":"2015-11-04T17:48:40","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T21:48:40","slug":"mellow-mood-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/mellow-mood-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Mellow Mood Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a book I finished recently – notable is the zig-zag Coptic stitch spine. I marked out the zig-zag first, then pierced each signature, keeping them in order, with my Japanese hole punch<\/a>, using a 1mm bit. This tool (also called a screw punch or book drill) drills a perfectly circular hole through your paper, just by pushing down on it. It was a little pricey at $55, but well worth it, to make crisp holes for Coptic binding.<\/p>\n

\"the<\/p>\n

the spine arcs nicely on a book sewn with a coptic stitch<\/p>\n

The blue paper is a lovely handmade cotton paper from India, Lana from PistolesPress<\/a>, who owns one of my favorite Etsy<\/a> shops, generously sent it to me when I commented that I loved the paper that she wrote the notes on that she included in my packages!<\/p>\n

\"Here's<\/p>\n

Here’s the front cover decorated with Indian handmade paper(blue) thin mullberry paper (purple) and Japanese Kozo paper (patterned)<\/p>\n

The gorgeous purple paper is a very thin Japanese Kozo paper, which lends itself well to collage – there’s actually two strips pasted together since I didn’t have one wide enough. The purple paper is mulberry paper, and where it overlays with the blue it gets that lovely purple color.<\/p>\n

\"It<\/p>\n

One of the great things about Coptic stitch journals is that they lay completely flat so that you can write in them more easily. The trade-off is that they aren’t quite as sturdy as a hardcover book – you can see here where there is some space between signatures, which on one hand enable it to lie open and on the other make the binding more “wobbly”. Also I want to point out the lined pages here – I made them in Adobe Illustrator (using the underscore key _____________ like so) and printed them in as soft grey.<\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

Inside the covers, the endpapers are made from Indian handmade cotton paper – here you can see my signature stamp as well. For the endpapers, more handmade paper – you can’t really see from this far away in the photo, but there are all kinds of little sparkly inclusions in the paper, which give it a very festive look.<\/p>\n

\"Here's<\/p>\n

Here’s a closeup of the spine; you can see how nicely the stitches lock together on a Coptic bound journal. Here’s a great view of all of the colors of the book coming together – the red waxed Irish Linen thread, and the blues, purples and creams of the paper and covers. Also here you can see what a nice job a Japanese hole punch does on the covers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A look at my blue and purple coptic-bound book, Mellow Mood Journal – with lined pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,99],"tags":[11,170,253,15,12,13],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-madeit","tag-coptic","tag-coptic-stitch","tag-coptic-stitch-variation","tag-handbound","tag-journal","tag-lined"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2315,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/2315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ruthbleakley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}