I am really excited this week to be able to share this one with you.  I’ve been sitting on it for several months because it was part of an Artisan swap that I was taking part in.  We were supposed to keep the recipient a secret. Since this has his heraldry on it, that would have been somewhat difficult.

I have worked on a lot of projects this year, but I think this is the one that I am most proud of.  And it wasn’t even the most difficult one (though it perhaps had the most steps).  This project required me to have a fairly broad array of skills, and some that I didn’t already possess.

To begin at the beginning.

I thought very hard about making my own paper for this book, but in the end I decided that was going a bit far, even for me.  I did attempt to use home-made paper for the end papers, but that was not a resounding success as you will see.  So instead of home made paper I chose a high quality parchment style paper.  The next step was to find some wood for the boards.  This I found at Michaels, with a reasonable width.  A quick trip to my friend Kaleeb’s house to borrow her circular saw and they were cut to a nice width as well.

There is a certain ratio of height to width that we have come to expect from books, and I chose to conform to that.  Unfortunately that meant that I had to cut down my paper, because when you fold a traditional 8.5×11 sheet in half, it is a bit longer than I wanted.

Once the paper has been trimmed, 2-4 sheets are stacked and folded in half.  Using more sheets per signature (as these booklets are called) makes for less work when sewing, but it also makes it more likely that your pages will be uneven and need to be trimmed.  I do not have a means of trimming the pages after they have been sewn so I stuck to small signatures.  Using a edge to press the fold makes for a neater edge as well.

The next thing that I needed was some kind of cord or tape.  I like the look of cord binding (that’s the raised lines across the spine of the book) so that’s what I chose to do.  For the cord (and for the sewing later) I am using some of my hand spun linen yarn/thread.  Since this is a medieval reproduction, I made the cord through a technique called finger-loop braiding.  This is fairly easy and is popular among preteens making friendship bracelets.  You can make some interesting patterns by varying the color of the loops, but since mine will be covered by leather, I stuck to an all white cord.  Finger loop braids can be done with anywhere from 3 to 12 loops.  I wanted a substantial cord, so I chose 8 which is the largest you can easily work with only 2 hands.  A great tutorial can be found here.  This one is worked in a spiral.

Once I had the cord finished, I suspended it on a frame made for book binding.  I borrowed this from Kaleeb, and I still need to return in.  🙂

This book has two cords on the spine.  I think that the next one I do will have 3.  The signatures are stacked on the board and one by one are sewn onto the cords with waxed linen thread.  I wish I had some pictures of this, but I was way to into the process to remember.  Again, YouTube is one of my favorite things ever.  You can learn to do just about anything there.  In this case BookBindersChronicle was an excellent instructor.  Many people argue that Coptic Binding is easier because it requires less in the way of equipment.  I had a terrible time not ripping through my signatures when I tried that.  This technique allows you to get the signatures tight up against one another without ripping through the little holes with your thread.  Here it is finished sewing and removed from the frame.

Next the boards have to be attached to the sewn pages.  I found this to be one of the trickier parts of the whole process.  You drill holes in the covers for the cords to run through, but it is very difficult to judge exactly how wide those holes have to be.  To fix the boards tightly to the cover I had to insert pegs into the holes to hold the cord in place.

Now it’s on to working on the cover.  I found a really good deal on goat skin leather from Distant Drums.  Around $25 got me enough leather to do 2-3 books this size and a couple of other smaller projects.  At 1.5 ounces, this leather is too thin for carving, so I used a technique called blind tooling.  Basically you get the leather damp where you want to tool and press your design into the leather with a dull(ish) utensil.  In this case, a knitting needle.

I drew on some medieval sources for the central design.  Both probably French, but possibly Italian from the 14th or 15th century.  The one on the left is in the British Museum and the one on the right, in the V&A.

I liked the back ground designs, but I wanted something a little simpler, mainly so that I could successfully create it.  🙂 It was very un-medieval to leave the back and sides blank, but I was quite frankly terrified of ruining the work I had already accomplished. (I looked up close at a medieval book this past weekend at the Chrysler Museum, and even the edges of the boards had been embossed.)

Once the leather was successfully carved, it had to be glued onto the boards.  The first time I did it, it was seriously crooked.  You never heard such cursing.  I did discover that Elmer’s is water soluble, and thoroughly soaking the glued leather allowed me to pull it off without damaging the tooling.  The second go round was much more successful.  Into a press the book goes, in this case it was wrapped in cloth and my illustrated Complete Works of William Shakespeare (a hefty volume) was placed upon it.

I mentioned before that I wanted to make linen end papers for the book.  Once again I am back to Kaleeb, this time begging her for her bags of linen scraps.  We were at this time in pre-Pennsic garb making fest.  Since she creates garb for 4-7 people each year, she generates a lot of linen scraps (I got enough to make an entire books worth of pages).  These I wetted down and attempted to get them to rot in a plastic bag.  Whatever modern treatments they use to prevent linen from molding work.  After three weeks damp, in plastic bags, in the warm Virginia Spring, they smelled a very little of mildew.  Well, I moved forward.  The linen scraps were still too sturdy to beat with a mortar, so I killed my hand cutting them up into small enough pieces to go in my blender.  I am very lucky that I did not burn out the motor in my blender attempting this, but I, eventually, managed to generate a more or less homogenous pulp.

Now I run into my second problem.  The frame and deckle I have can make an 8.5×11 sheet, with ragged edges.  I don’t want ragged edges, so I need to be able to trim the the sheet.  No where can you find an oversized deckle and frame, so off to the hardware store I go to get the things I need to make one.  I am pretty proud of my frame.  It was built entirely with hand tools and is held together by pegs.  The deckle is the grate that goes over industrial lighting fixtures, and the screen, regular window screen.  I needed a large pool of water, hence the kids wading pool.  I poured the pulp into the frame, agitated gently… and came up with a lumpy mess with a definitely “crafty” feel, not in keeping with the rest of the project.  🙁  I just couldn’t get the linen fibers broken up enough to make a smooth paper.  At this point I was getting pretty close to my deadline to send the project on to my partner for painting, so I decided to shelve this part for later.  I ended up choosing a heavy weight paper stock from the scrapbooking aisle of the craft store.  In retrospect, I would have chosen a lighter weight paper.  I had difficulty gluing in the papers and not having a huge wrinkle in the fold.  Still, I was over-all happy with the result.  Here is what it looked like when I sent it off.

I hope to get pictures soon, either from my partner or from the recipient that show what it looks like now that it has been painted.