About a week ago my coworker gave me some large sheets of cardboard. I often use them at work for making posters. Sometimes I take the sheets home and draw and sketch on them. This time I chopped them into 8×11 sized sheets and decided to make a book. I’ve wanted to practice some of the structures from Keith A. Smith’s book “Smith’s Sewing Single Sheets” for awhile. This is the second book I’ve made from this book, and once I figured out the structure and the stitching it’s about as difficult as any 2 needle Coptic stitch.

There are some areas where I need to work on my stitching but over all this is definitely a book structure I will make again. 

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For the cover I managed to find some honeycomb corrugated cardboard, I sanded the images off and then applied several layers of gesso to build texture. I then rubbed in some black gesso, several layers of asphaltum colored Golden glaze and then added a little unbleached titanium. I finished it off by added a heavy layer of satin varnish and then buffed that with bee’s wax. The pictures do not do this justice. There is a lot more depth to the color than shows in these pics.

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 Each of the leaves has 2 layers of gesso on one side.

I’ll be honest; I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this book. The little issues with the stitching mean that I can’t (won’t) sell it but I think it’s such a cool structure that I want to do something with it. Part of making this was to make it prove to myself that I could do it.