The picture below is of my sewing awls. Essentially I took a large dowel- broom handle sized cut it to my hand size plus an inch. so they were about 5.5 inches long when I started. I then put a drum sander, 90 grit, into the drill press and set it to a medium rotation. I rotated the dowel and sanded one end down to create a taper. I also rounded over the other end. I also added some additional divots to make it feel nicer in my hand. I rubbed it down with some fine sandpaper to eliminate any splinters that the drum sander may have left.

Then I used a drill bit slightly larger than my needle and bore a hole into the tapered end of the handle. I filled the hole with 2 part epoxy and set my needle into the epoxy. I bore the hole so that it would leave about an inch of my needle exposed. The head of the needle is in the epoxy. I then made sure my needle was straight and let it set over night.

I trimmed off any excess glue with a razor and polished my needle after sharpening it on a diamond stone. I didn’t finish the handle mainly because I wanted to use it right away but also because I like the patina wood gets after you’ve handled it. I also knew that when I use my awl my hand is usually covered in bee’s wax which also give wood s nice glow. Simple and effective.

THe following items are up on etsy here. I put up 2 hedgehogs and one set of 2 blue canson mein-teintes covered jotters.

Hedgehog filled with 160 pages of strathmore Ivory linen paper.

The darker blue set of jotters is on etsy right now. 50 pages of southworth ivory paper. They are covered in heavy Canson Mein-Teintes paper.

This last notebook is on etsy. Filled with 160 pages of ice blue strathmore paper, hand stitched and glued.

So My brother has 3 sewing cradles made. 1 will go on my etsy account, one on his and one is currently up on eBay right now. You can see it here He did a great job with them and all the pictures I’ve seen look fantastic.

So over the weekend I’ve been working on a massive stack of hedgehogs. Of the 9 that I made 2 are spoken for and the rest will go to either eBay or etsy. It was good to be in the studio and making hedgehogs. I feel like I focus on one variety of book per weekend. I’d like to expand that and make a bunch of sewn books as well as hedgehogs. Alas I do have a life outside of the studio.

Each of the hedgehogs has a different paper inside, some have Strathmore laid texture with an ivory color, a few have white laid paper and one has Strathmore ice blue wove texture paper. Each one has 160 pages, a pocket, bookmark and an elastic closure. I’m very happy with how they turned out and how the press worked on them.

This is also the first batch of books that I used my new sewing cradle to punch the stations.

This one is up on ebay here.

This one is up on ebay here.

This one isn’t listed anywhere yet.

This one is claimed.

This one will go up on etsy tomorrow.

Tomorrow around 9am Eastern time the press listed on eBay here Ends it’s auction. I’d like to also point out that my brother also has one listed on his etsy account here.

THe original post about the press(es) currently on sale is here

My brother Allen has an etsy shop., it’s called BookWorks. He plans on having the aforementioned sewing cradles and of course his book presses on there. I’m pretty excited about it for him.

His etsy shop can be found here.

I’ll have a link to the right side ASAP.

Just a quickie before bed: This is the sewing cradle my brother made for me. It’s 11 inches long and 6 inches high. It’s made of solid pine. The boards that hold the paper are situated with a gap between them to allow an awl to pass between them.

I’ve put it through it’s paces and it was wonderful. It’s amazing what good well made tools can do to make binding easier.

These will be up on ebay, etsy and my brother’s new etsy shop.

Another interesting item that I had my brother and father recreate/make for me is my version of the sewing cradle. For ages I worked with a cardboard cradle that I made after the pictures I saw on Volcano arts. It worked great. Then I decided I wanted something a little more stiff and permanent, so I designed and tried to make one out of wood, well my efforts with wood were crude at best but served to make a functional but ugly sewing cradle.

So when I went to Maine I took wit me my sewing cradle. Explained my original concept to my brother who said “Oh Yeah we can do that you just use this tool. What do you mean you tried to use the router to do that?” At which point my father said “Your lucky you didn’t hurt yourself.”

The result is a fantastic light weight 100% pine handmade sewing cradle. I put my nerw cradle through it’s paces yesterday with the punching of 8 hedgehog blocks, and it ruled. IT sat flat on my table top and was stiff, allowing me to pucnh through more signatures at once than my old cradle. I’ll post some pictures of it tonight.

As many of you know I’ve changed jobs. I stayed with the company that I’ve been with for the last 4 years and switched to a position that is more in keeping with my interests as well as my temperament. I won’t go into it too much here, but let’s say that I’m a lot happier after a week of the new job.

ONe of the main reasons that I went for it is the regular schedule. IF this weekend is any example, after a brief nap I’ll have very productive days working in the studio- I made 50 assorted notebooks and journals. (Swan a stack of yours are on that list.) That’s a lot of work for a weekend and it pleases me greatly to know that I’ll be able to reproduce that effort on most weekends.

Hopefully the upcoming weeks will leave me a little less exhausted than this week did. IT was the first week and all!

This is what the inside of all the recycled notebooks looks like, on some of the larger books the “team member favorites” is along the top or bottom of the page, but essentially this is what they look like.