Tag Archives: leather

Book blocks, glue and leather

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Whew. In addition to mowing the lawn* I managed to finish that fat stack of 7 hedgehog/ moleskin notebooks I've been sitting on for close to 2 weeks. The elastics and envelopes went in in no time and pressed for a few hours. In that time I glued 6 more blocks into leather covers.

I pulled the finished books out of the press, signed and dated them, stuffed business cards in the pockets and then shot pictures. Edited said pictures and then listed all the items to my artfire shop. It went smoothly and everything looks good.

Thursday I visited my friend in Swampscott and she had been hoarding some paper and advertising posters for me. I walked away with 20 or so posters and about 2 reams of paper. I'll be able to use the guillotine to chop them up into nice matchbook notebooks. The posters are already chopped to size and will be stored until the next time I make a big batch of jotters. I also got some plastic posters that I use for jigs. I set up a jig to make covers with some of the left over scraps as the spine with some great backer board as the cover. I picked up some 30×40 sheets of backer board at the Charette clearance sale in Woburn.So I'm going to try out some new books and stitches. Fun stuff planned.

Tomorrow I'm headed to Western Mass to help a friend set up an ArtFire and an Etsy shop. I"ll spend the afternoon testing out my skillz.

*no small feat considering that it's rained every weekend for the last 3 weeks and I've not been able to mow for that whole time. The grass was halfway to my knees and I"ve got an electric lawn mower… It wasn't pretty.

Another Big Journal

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This large 6×9 inch journal is entirely handmade. The cover is hand cut from a smoothly textured jet black cowhide. the spine of this journal is 1.5 inches thick.

The inside pages are 160 unlined 110lb cardstock. The color of these pages is a warm cream color. The texture of the pages is perfect for writing and sketching. The paper is acid free. It’s a wonderful thick paper perfect for writing with a heavy fountain pen, no feathering or bleed through in my experience. It’s a lovely paper.

The pages are hand sewn to the cover with unbleached naturally colored Irish linen thread. It’s been lightly waxed to prevent fraying and tangling during sewing. The sewing style on this journal is a variation of the long stitch. The there are 3 keyholes that peak through the cover to the folded edges of the paper.

The back cover folds over the front to form an envelope style flap. This protects the inner pages from damage but also holds everything secure. It expands allowing you to stuff as much onto these pages as possible. From the flap emerges a long matching leather strap that ties around the journal and to itself to hold everything inside securely. With 160 pages to glue or stuff into this could end up being a very thick journal.

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ON etsy here.

Big Leather Journals

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This week I finished 5 more journals. 4 are going up to my etsy account and one is going to eBay. All are smythe sewn- the style of moleskines. So I start with the book block, stitch it, then glue it and clamp it. Then that book block is glued into a cover.

For these I decided to make covers with flaps and straps instead of elastics. I thought it would be a nice deviation from what I’ve been doing. I’m particularly fond of the distressed brown leather. I like to call the color Choco-Latte, because it’s the color of coffee or milk chocolate.

The 4 below are the books on etsy. They are on there for $24.99 plus shipping via priority mail.

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New Jotters

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I don’t have pictures yet but I bought more graph paper, so I made a metric ton of graph paper jotters. They came out great. I also stitched up a lot of blocks for hedgehogs- 8 with 65 lb super stiff cover stock in cream, 120 pages in 6 signatures. The blocks came out really nice. Later this week I’ll be gluing them up and cutting covers.
I’m also working on some of the journals I used to make- leather with paper backing and super nice paper inside. Yeah baby. I’ll get some pics up tomorrow.