3-hole pamphlet tutorial

I just made my first bookbinding tutorial. With GIFs! Be impressed. You can check it out (and learn how to make this pretty baby on the left) at my other other blog, abookfull.tumblr.com.

bradel binding

For the first books in my Bookbinding 3 class we had to make two books in the Bradel style. What is that, you ask? Basically, Bradel is German for: freaking complicated. The whole time I was making these books I just hated it. We had to make made end sheets, round the spines, make a cardstock spine called a bonnet, build up the cover boards to make them tall enough to fit into the shoulder, cover the book with fabric once it's all assembled, then paste down a piece of marbled paper. It took for-ev-er.

But, once it was done, I LOVED it! They just felt so nice and weighty, just solid and real, you know? I really liked how they turned out, even if I wasn't a big fan of all the intermediate steps.

The one on the left is what the spine is supposed to look like. The one on the right, while it looks rounder, is actually less correct. Fun fact.

The marbled paper is the paste down. Doesn't it look great?!

Anyway, that's a thing that I did recently...

book gifts

A while ago I alluded to a book I sent to a friend in Boston but didn't post pictures of it because it was, you know, a surprise. There was also a book I said I'd made but couldn't show you because it was a gift.  Well, now here are some pictures of the books that had been shrouded in such mystery. Remain calm.

Teddy Bear book inspired by Jacob's second blog.

As soon as I saw this paper I knew it had to go into Jacob's book because
it looked gross and moldy and Jacob loves things that look gross and moldy.

This book was for Braeden's sister Vanessa:
it's a rebinding of her favorite book by Neil Gaiman.

I speckled the edges. No big deal.

So, there's a bookmaking update for you. I also gave Braed's dad a book for Christmas that I'd made for class but lamely forgot to take a picture before handing it over. I will tell you, however, that he really liked it. So much, in fact, that he kindly requested a handmade book each year. I love book love.

our lil' Christmas tree

Remember how I fell in love with making little books? Well Braeden and I unearthed our own lil' Christmas tree so that we could hang this lil' beauty:

 It's a miniature version of the guest book that I made for our wedding, and I still had some materials left over (though I couldn't find all the materials—see if you can find the differences in the photo below) and I thought it would be the perfect first mini book ornament for our tree.

Pretty cute, right? Here are some of our other ornaments that we've gathered this year...

I made a paper star garland threaded with binding thread.

One of the glass ornaments I made at the State Fair this summer.

The Nauvoo Sun Stone ornament.
We also gave this to our family members who came out for our wedding.

The whole tree. Usually I'm not a fan of tiny trees but this year I'm all about it.

Yay for tiny things! Braed thinks we should make it a tradition to make a tiny book ornament ever year and make this tiny tree our book tree. I think that sounds lovely.

a tiny book

At the Conservation Lab at the University Library where I work, we have a tiny conservation-themed Christmas tree. (See the slightly blurry photo below.)

Our conservation-themed Christmas tree.

So today I made my own contribution to the tree with an ornament that embodies the work that I do at the lab: clean and flatten flood books, mostly from the Cedar Rapids Czech and Slovak Library and Museum. First I cut down some scrap paper, folded it into sections, sewed it into a text block and glued it up. Cute, no?

This lil' book's pages are about 1 1/4 in by 1 in.

See how tiny it is in this normal-sized lying press? Adorable.

Here you can see the cover of the book. It is a color photocopy of the cover an actual book from the museum.
I wrapped the photocopy around a tiny piece of card stock instead of book board.
On the spine you can see the author's name, Jan Stiavnicky. Jan is a pretty popular Czech name.

This is the book with cardstock interleaving and sandwiched between book board, blotter, and remay.
This is how I flatten all the regular sized books, too.

I actually spritzed the interleaving and cover before I put it in the sealer, just like the regular books.
This is the book getting sealed in our vacuum sealer.

And here it is, the final product, hanging on the tree.

So, that's all. That's what I did today. For like 3 hours. Also, I cleaned some regular-sized books for the African-American Museum. All in a day's work.

The whole time I was working I just kept thinking about how cute little things are a wondering if that's some sort of instinctual affection that has to do with nurturing young or something. Things to think about. I also liked that I was able to use a bunch of seemingly useless paper and board scraps since I hate throwing things away. Who knows? Maybe I will now go on a tiny book making spree with all of the paper scraps in my studio. Maybe.

a book

I finished re-binding a book the other day and I am super proud of it!

But it is also is a Christmas gift so I cannot post a picture of it here.

But trust me, it's great.

i made this book.

I made this book today for my bookbinding class. This is called a long and link stitch binding. (The long stitches are the straight up and down ones, the links are at the top and bottom of the spine, as well as the circle in the middle.) After seeing the books in the conservation lab, this style was the one I was most excited about learning.

I really liked how it turned out so I thought I'd share. I got all of the materials either from the freebie drawer in the campus studio or via unlimited material access thanks to my semester studio fee. This is the first time I've used leather on a book (not counting a tiny book I made for a non-bookbinding class once in my undergrad and I didn't really know what I was doing) and I think it came out well!

Click to enlarge.
(And feel free to ignore The Daily Show on the tv in the background...)

Click to enlarge.
Spine detail.
I used a Japanese push drill to punch the holes.
I now covet one very much.

I love the surprise of the red paste down inside.

Not bad, eh?

bookbinding 2 @ the library

Today my class went to the conservation lab to see the model and exemplar books we have in our collection. Jill organized these books last year, grouping them by century and style: I walk past these shelves every day at work but had never had the occasion to open the boxes containing the books to have a look, so it was exciting to see them all out in the open. I took lots of pictures which you can see if you click "Read more >>" at the end of this post.

But, in case you're going to stop reading before that, here are two pictures of my sunburn from spending just 15 minutes of my lunch break outside today:

High fives?

PS I got a letter in the mail today informing me that I qualify for resident tuition!!! That means my tuition bill will be one third of what it would be for out of state tuition. It also means that we can actually afford for me to go to school, even if I never get an assistantship. Hooray for not having to go into debt!

(And don't forget about the book pictures after the jump!)

friends

Since Braeden and I got married I have often lamented to him how I feel like we have no friends. I know we were busy with the wedding for so long and then people were out of town for the summer and and we weren't in the single's branch anymore so suddenly we were out of our previous social circle, but still: it's been rough. It's different making friends with people who have kids already because it totally changes the whole dynamic: they can't hang out late unless they have a sitter or one of them stays home or we go to their house, which is fine except it means we have to be invited, not the other way around. And people with kids have a lot more going on than we do, generally speaking, so it's hard to find time to get together to begin with. Plus did I mention that we're in the Primary so we basically only know 3 year olds at church anyway?

But today I made a new friend. She's in our new ward and has 3 kids—5, 3, and 6 months—and she took a bookbinding class at BYU just like I did, so tonight we got together to make books. It was really fun! It was good because it meant I got to work on some books for my current bookbinding class that I've been putting off because of fear (I don't know why but case bindings always make me very, very nervous) and it was fun to just hang out and chat with someone else about her life and things in general. Plus, she had powdered donuts: always a win.

the other day...

The other day I helped my neighbor Kara Harley make a book. She brought over the manuscript paper and I taught her how to 3-hole pamphlet stitch it. Then she had to go so I brought it to work the next day and trimmed it and put the covers on for her. I was pretty satisfied with the final product, and not just because I got the cover board free from a giant pallet in the library basement that was supposed to be shipped to Peru but then was deemed too expensive so it just sits in the basement and you can use it for free.

i have been slacking...

...but only in the blogging department. Remember that book I promised you pictures of? Here they are!

This is called a Flag book. The top and bottom flags are overlapping  photocopies of duck and soy sauce packets and the middle picture fits together as a picture of me and the Braeden.

Here's the cover. I made the soy sauce rings and paper fortune cookie all myself.

You can see that the story of our first lunch date is told on the backsides of the flaps. Cute.

This is the book I made for my class tonight. It's a Jacob's Ladder book made from old cassette tapes courtesy of my lovely neighbors.

Front.

Back.

Here's a lil video of the book in action:

I was complimented in my class tonight about the lovely clacking noise the book makes when the tapes hit against each other. I hope you enjoyed that, too.

PS Check out the wedding blog for some fun updates on that front!

books: the future, not the past

Tonight as part of our date night (what, are we married already? date night? that's something that old, married people do...) Braeden and I went to the closing reception for the University of Iowa Center for the Book exhibit at the Main Library on campus.

I had been told about it by my supervisor at work, Kristin, and it sounded interesting: there were 4-5 presentations by UICB colleagues in the Pecha Kucha style. The final presentation was done by Matt Brown (the head of the Center for the Book with whom I exchanged a series of stressful emails over Christmas break so I could register for just one class this semester) and it was the perfect response to the seemingly ever-present question: what is the future of books in this technological age? His answer? First of all, people have been asking this question for at least the last 20 years, and guess what? Books still exist. Secondly (and this was my favorite part of the answer), people asked the same question about oil painting when the camera came along: what will happen to oil painting now that we have the camera here to record life for us instead? What happened was the popularization of photography freed up oil painting to do much greater things than just portraits and landscapes: Salvador Dalí? Pablo Picasso? Vincent Van Gogh? Claude Monet? Heard of these guys? Yeah, all of their work was done after the flash-bang of photography, an event that was supposed to make painting a quaint thing of the past.

It will be the same for books. Now that we have computers and the internet to take care of things like phone directories and encyclopedic references, it will be easier to make books into works of art, beautiful things to look upon and to touch and to experience in a totally new and artistic way, not simply a utilitarian day-to-day, hum-drum functionality.

My friends, we are not living on the precipice of the death of the book, we are living in the future.

i couldn't sleep...so i made a book

The other night I was having a really hard time getting to sleep: this happens sometimes. My mind was just racing with the thoughts of all of the things I have to do (some of which still aren't done...) and I decided that instead of stressing about it and trying to force myself to sleep I was just going to get up and do something, even though it was midnight.

My friend Eric had been asking me to make a tiny book for him to use sort of like flashcards (something about math and other math... I don't really know...) and I figured that would be a good way to get something off my plate and earn a little cash as well. Here's what the final product looked like:

The final product was about 3.5 in by 3.5 in, more or less. I left the string really long and told him that he could trim it down to a more manageable size if he liked. He wanted the cover to be the color of math: I'm not really sure what the color of math is, so I went with blue.

He wanted 90 pages so I had to do a double pamphlet stitch to accommodate them all (that's why there's that little blue tab in the middle).

The paper was graph paper since that's what he'd asked for, and, let's be honest, it's the best kind of lined paper.

Hey! I made that!

make make make make

So I've been pretty busy as of late. You know, making things: books, lemon sugar scrubs, BACK BLOGGING (feel free to check out the January archives at your leisure), boxes, getting engaged... things of that nature.

Meanwhile, here are some photos to commemorate the recent making of the things:

I made this last semester for my Bookbinding I class, but only recently traded it to my friend Jarrod (along with a promised knit hat from Braeden) for his old tv. Not too shabby...

On the cover is the end paper from an old book I got from the Hartleys entitled, Who Invented It and How Does it Work?  It's a kid's book all about inventors and inventions. I've used various other pages for other projects as well, but I just love this cover paper. A lot.

I used a found poster about cells for the inside end paper.

I'm a little jealous that Jarrod is now the owner of this amazing book, but what are books for if not to trade for tvs? I mean, really.

This was a lemon sugar scrub that I made via a recipe from my mom (1c. sugar, 1/2 c. olive oil, 1T. lemon zest) for Crystal, one of the girls Sarah and I visit teach. It was her birthday yesterday and it was a great excuse to make it. (Also to buy this cute container I found at Stuff: only .99!)

I'm pretty proud of my lemon-shaped tag...

I also made this card for her. It's supposed to be shaped like a heart when it's closed but that pattern I had was off so I had to make up my own: it could still use a few modifications.

Here it is, opened.

Sarah and I stopped by Crystal's to drop off a slice of cake and the lemon sugar scrub and we had a great visit! Previously Crystal had been really busy so we'd only been able to sit down and talk with her once before now so it was really fun to just sit and chat with her this time. I like her a lot and hope that we'll be able to see more of her this year.

When Braeden and I were in Utah we went to Guru's for lunch with my friend Nigel and had their amazing sweet potato fries. After trying them Braeden swore that he would do his best to find a recipe to make our own when we got back to Iowa. Tonight, he did. Behold:

We decided the fries, which we sprinkled with seasoning salt before baking, were a little wide so next time we'd cut them in half lengthwise, but other than that they were great! I wish we had made twice as many (which, if we'd cut them in half, we would have). The dipping sauce was also incredible and, according to Braeden, is the same sauce they use at Red Robin (but tastes just like the one they use at Guru's too). Fun fact. Make your own. I dare you.

Braeden was on a making food kick so he started to make these red velvet cake balls, too.

Roll it, pat it, mark it with a B! (And put it in the freezer for Braeden and me!)

You have to be careful with red velvet cake because it turns your hands a little red... Who would have thought?

They look like meatballs, but they're not. I promise.

How can you not love this face?!

We put them in the freezer (then fridge) to harden up, then dipped a few in melted chocolate chips (we forgot to buy the chocolate bark) and they were amazingly moist and delicious!

(though not very pretty since we coated them with melted chocolate chips instead of the chocolate bark...)

Phew! And that is just a little of what I've been up to these days. I apologize for my negligence, Blog-o-sphere and will try to be better in the future...where we live.