A Yen For Paper

CHERRY BLOSSOM TIME

I have two reasons for choosing this theme for today’s binding - firstly, my personal theme for this year is blossoming/flourishing; and secondly cherry blossom season will arrive in Japan shortly. As you can see this is another of my longstitch experiments, bound in red leather and stitched with white linen thread. For the centre of the flower motif I have used pink silk thread.

 

The pages are Arches watercolour paper with sewing supports in Canson paper in a bright pink shade.

The pages themselves have been randomly decorated with pink and green watercolour paint and stamped with white gouache and stamping ink and it’s actually a lot of fun to do. I usually paint the whole large sheet and then tear into pages sized pieces afterwards, it is easier to get a random effect that way.

I really like binding these little journals, as you can be quite creative with them and the end result is a cute little journal which is really nice to handle and it opens nicely too.

LITTLE CLOUD JOURNAL

You can probably tell that I am in France at the moment since this is a “Little Cloud Journal”  and not a big dark cloud journal :-) I am so enjoying doing the leather longstitch bindings at the moment that I found myself binding this one today, without really planning to do it.

I had already splashed some watercolours around with a large japanese-style paintbrush and then dried and pressed the folios.

This image of page one gives an inkling of what’s inside. As you can see, the pages are fairly small, it could be used for short quotations or just little phrases or words that you like.

The closure involves a nice metallic disc and some of the rayon ribbon used in the Textural Tackets journal.

I rather like the Little Cloud Journal, even although it doesn’t have a silver lining!

TEXTURAL TACKETS

I am still having fun experimenting with the Medieval-style "limp" bindings, and this time I thought that it would be fun to bind a book with more unconventional and modern materials.

As you can see I decided on a black felted wool cover - it's really a pity you can't touch it because it feels REALLY nice! I stitched the folio sections into the felted cover with quite a chunky black linen thread and used some reddish pink viscose ribbon flecked with black for the direct tacketing.

 I don't often use non-natural materials, but this ribbon/tape from Stef Francis really is gorgeous and it comes in such a wide range of really beautiful subtle shades - you will find them hard to resist! I knotted the tackets and left the ends quite long as a design feature.

Lastly, as a closure for this lovely tactile woollen book, I used a nice glass toggle-type button with silver metallic flecks through it and silver wire banding around it, which I think suits rather well.  It's such a cuddly kind of a book, reminds me of an old and much loved duffle coat :-)