nacramamo | Entries tagged with bookbinding

The last few days were such a whirlwind of work and bookbinding that I completely forgot what I did when, but I definitely did something every day.

Laundry detergent
Remember that conker laundry detergent I made in the beginning of the month? Well, I finally had the chance to use it! I put some of the dried conker bits in water and waited until it turned into a soapy liquid. Then I filtered the conkers out, added the liquid to the washing machine and turned the machine on. It was really easy. The laundry came out looking clean, so I suppose it has worked. The only thing is that this laundry detergent has no smell and that takes some time getting used to, I find. Otherwise, this seems to be succesful.

This is what the laundry detergent looked like

Bookbinding
First, I finished the two books I had to finish for class. I'm not super happy with them, but I didn't spend that much time on them either, since the commission was my priority. For the first book, I found some odd, textured paper in my stash that I decided to use. This paper was very difficult to work with, because it was transparent, so everything shows through. I used more glue in the middle than around the edges and you can very clearly see that, because the black paper I used underneath shows through. Oh well, now I know what not to do when I use the other sheet I have of this paper. For the second book I tried something I have wanted to try for some time, namely folding paper into pleats. I made three pleats on the front cover and left the back plain. I really like how minimalistic it looks. I just don't like the placement of the pleats very much, but I hope the design will look more balanced when I trim the books in class in a few days.

The weird book and the pleat book

I made a lot of progress with the sheet music commissions. I have now made all the endpapers, which was a lot of work. I wanted my design to look very neat and clean and it took a lot of time and experimentation to figure out how best to do that. But I did it and am happy with how they turned out!

The endpapers! I love how clean this looks. There are some irregularities in the middle, but that was fine, because the sheet was going to be folded in half anyway. I tried a few different methods to see which one gave me the best results, and that turned out to be ruler + white gelly roll pen, so that's how all six endpapers are made.

Then I discovered that the dark blue tapes I had sewed the books on showed through the bookcloth I want to use on the cover, so I cut new tapes in white and resewed all three books onto those. It was frustrating to have to cut the books apart and redo them, but if it makes the end result better, it will be worth it.

I glued my freshly made enpaper onto the bookblocks and glued the spines. As I'm writing this, I still have one more book to glue, but I hope to get to that within the next few days. After that, I will still have a lot of work and experimentation to do, but the bulk of the work for these books will be behind me, which is a really good feeling!

The resewn bookblocks with the endpapers attached. The top one has been glued, the bottom one not yet, so you can see what a difference gluing makes. I have another one glued, but that one was still drying at the time of taking this picture, so you'll have to take my word for it that it's done.

Final notes
Wow, I can't believe this challenge is already behind us. October flew by so fast. I had a blast doing this challenge and sharing my work with you guys, though I am sorry I didn't finish much this month. I mostly started projects, so I posted a lot of process pics. All these projects will get finished, but not in October anymore, obviously. When I have the sheet music commission finished, I'll probably post pictures of it on my personal journal though, as I do with all of my more complicated bookbinding projects, so feel free to subscribe if you want to see them.

I also loved seeing what everyone else was doing, since we were all working on completely different projects and crafts. Keep up the great work and hope to see you all again elsewhere/ next year!

antuhsa

Well, this will be the easiest and shortest post I've written on here, because I've done nothing but bookbinding for the whole week. That's not even much of an exaggeration, because there were a few days on which I spent more than 12 hours bookbinding. It was really intense. A friend asked me to bind her sheet music for her (my first commission, yay!) and that turned out to be a lot more work than I expected, so I spent most of my time on that. I'm not even close to being finished yet, so I will have a couple more bookbinding days ahead of me. But that's ok. I have an idea in mind for those books that I really love and I can't wait to see my vision come to life!

Here are the books I've been working on last week! There are 7 books on the photo, but there's an 8th one that still has to be sewn.

The small one on top is a practice piece for myself. It has no deadline and I have no idea what I want to do with it yet, so that one is finished for the time being.

The two books below are for class. The homework was to sew and glue them, which I did a few days ago, so those are also finished for now.

The two yellow ones below you've already seen. Those are also for class and the homework is to finish the cover. I worked on that last week. I only have to add some finishing touches and then they'll be done! I'll show them in more detail in my next post.

And the two books at the bottom are the commission. I've sewn them last week. There will be a third volume of sheet music which I'm working on right now and hope to have sewn on Wednesday. I've also designed the cover and the end pages last week and I'll start making those as soon as all the books are sewn. So yeah, plenty of work ahead still. I don't think I'll be feeling bored any time soon.

antuhsa

I was on vacation for all of last week, so I didn't have time to post until now. I did get a lot done though!

Day 12
Unfortunately, I had to skip this day because I was travelling. I took much longer than I had expected to reach my destination, so by the time I finally got there, I didn't want to do anything anymore.

Day 13 - Cooking
I made borscht (Eastern European beetroot soup)! A Polish friend made it for me years ago and I loved it, but I somehow never got around to making it myself. I don't know if I made it in the 'proper' way, but it was very good nonetheless. I forgot to take pictures though, again. I keep eating my food before remembering to take out my camera :/

Day 14 - Cooking
I made banana chips. The friend who was on vacation with me brought a lot of bananas. I don't like them much, but I do like banana chips, so I tried to make it. I took two bananas, sliced them very thinly and put them in the over on a low temperature for a few hours. They were really nice and crispy at the end, but they didn't taste as well as I had hoped. I'll look up a recipe if I ever decide to do this again.

Day 15 - Sewing
I repaired the lining in my winter coat. The stitching had come undone around the armscyes, making the coat less waterproof in that area, so it was high time to repair it.

Day 16 - Sewing
Repairing the lining in my coat was so relaxing, that I finally felt ready to tackle a sewing project I've been wanting to finish for months: a sleeping mask. It's an easy project and I had the fabric already cut out and everything, but I always found excuses not to work on it. One of my main goals for NaCraMaMo was to finally finish this and I'm super happy to say that I did it! On day 16, I just sat on the sofa with my sewing supplies, calmly handsewing while my friend was watching a movie. It was the most relaxing thing to do and I enjoyed it tremendously. I was almost sorry to see it finished and wished I had taken supplies for more sewing projects with me.

The mask. The flowery cotton was left over from another project and the black cotton on the back comes from a shirt that was falling apart.

Day 17 - Sewing
I remembered I had some bias binding with me and decided to sew that onto the edges of my sleeping mask, because I wanted to do more sewing. Once again, I had the most relaxing evening and wished I had more sewing projects to work on.

I'm very happy that the mask is finished though! I wear sleeping masks all the time because I wake up immediately if there's even the smallest ray of light in my room. My previous sleeping mask was falling apart and smelling badly, however, so I'm glad I can finally replace it.

Day 18 - Bookbinding
I had also taken a lot of bookbinding supplies with me on vacation, and with all the sewing done, I had the time to work on that. Because of my inability to say no to fun creative projects, I suddenly have 8 bookbinding projects right now, so it was high time to get started. I folded the pages for three books and put them in the press to ge the air out, so I could continue with them the next day.

Day 19 - Bookbinding
The three bookblocks came out of the press looking nice and neat, so I made templates for where I wanted the sewing holes to be and pricked them.

Dag 20 - Bookbinding
I sewed one of the three bookblocks. I'll do the other two later this week. I don't need to go beyond the sewing stage for these books yet, so once I've sewn them, I can focus on the other 5 books I have to make. It's a bit overwhelming to have this many bookbinding projects at the same time, but also very exciting. Luckily I have this week off from work as well, so I hope I'll be able to get a lot of work done!

(Sorry for the lack of pictures this week btw. It's just that photos of folded sheets of paper aren't that interesting, so I'll post more bookbinding pics next week, when I've made more progress with my projects)

antuhsa

Day 7: Cooking
I made something I've wanted to make for a very long time: traditional pudding. I've been fascinated by the 18th century practice of boiling puddings in a pudding cloth since I first heard of it, so it was high up on my bucket list to try it. The problem is that for most of these puddings you need suet, which, as a vegetarian, I don't really want to use, so I've been on the lookout for a suet-free recipe. Eventually I found a traditional pudding from my country, called Jan in de zak (in English: John in the bag or batter pudding), which didn't require suet, so I decided to make it. It's surprisingly easy. You need to make pancake batter, pour it in a pudding cloth/ tea towel that's dusted with flour, tie the tea towel off, and toss the whole thing in a pot filled with boiling water for a few hours. That's it. You usually serve it with some kind of sauce, like syrup or melted butter. Overall, it's an easy and cheap dish, only a little time-consuming.

Pouring the batter in the tea towel

A slice of the pudding

The only problem I encountered was that my pot wasn't big enough, so not all of the pudding was covered by the boiling water, which resulted in parts of it remaining undercooked. Nevertheless, the taste was quite good. I'm glad I finally gave it a try and will probably make it again once I have a bigger pot.

Day 8: Cooking
My bookbinding classes start late in the afternoon and end late in the evening, so dinner is an issue. I've now started experimenting with food that tastes good both warm and cold, so I can have it the day before class, put the leftovers in the fridge, and then have those in class the next day. On day 8, I had some leftovers from a Moroccan lentil stew and decided to bake that into a cake so I could easily take it to class. This recipe was my own and is one of the most random things I've ever cooked. I basically took the stew, added eggs, milk and flour to it until it started to look like cake batter, and baked that in the oven. The result was ok. The consistency of the cake was good, but some of the flavours of the stew got lost in the baking process. I'm not sure how to avoid that next time, but I'll figure it out. I think it was a good way of turning leftovers into a proper meal that you can eat cold the next day, but I'll need to experiment with it some more.

Completely forgot to take pictures of the cake...

Day 9: Bookbinding
Bookbinding class day! I cut the boards to size and glued them onto the bookblocks. I also glued book cloth on the spine of one of them.

Day 10: Sewing
Last winter, two buttons fell off my winter coat. It was almost spring by that time, so I just ignored it. However, with autumn in full swing, it was high time I sewed them back on. It ony took 15 minutes maybe, but I still feel very accomplished that I finally got it done!

Day 11: Bookbinding
I glued book cloth on the spine of the second book, yay! The books are currently drying in my press. We have a few weeks off from class now, so I have enough time to finish them. Somewhere in the next two weeks, I'll need to come up with a nice design, get some paper to cover the boards with and glue that on. I'll trim the edges when class resumes and then they'll be completely finished!

antuhsa

Hi!

So here's my first week of doing this challenge. I really enjoyed it and got quite a lot done this week!

Day 1: bookbinding
I'm enrolled in a bookbinding programme. The classes are once a week, for a few years, and at the end you are officially a professional bookbinder. I've only just started this programme; last week was the third class. In the second class we practised sewing the bookblocks, and the homework was to finish it, so I did.

Day 2: bookbinding
This day I had the third bookbinding class. We glued the endpapers onto the bookblocks, aligned the signatures perfectly and glued the spine to make the signatures stay in place. I only managed to do one bookblock in class and did the second one at home. Here is the first one drying in my (also self-made!) book press.

Day 3: bookbinding
I glued the spine of the second bookblock once the first was dry. I took both bookblocks out of the press earlier today, so here they are! Next week in class I'll give them a cover.

Day 4: making laundry detergent
Last year I heard it's possible to make your own laundry detergent out of conkers/ horse chestnuts, so I was really curious and wanted to try it this year. I collected 160 conkers and set to work. To make the laundry detergent, you have to cut the conkers into small pieces and dehydrate them. Unfortunately, my oven is very small, so I could only do a handful of conkers at a time, which meant this work took absolutely forever. I did a batch almost every day this week and was heartily sick of it near the end.

Conkers are very hard, so the best way to get them into smaller pieces was to smash them with a hammer and put them in the blender. When that was done, I put them in the oven at a very low temperature for about 2,5 hours. They came out looking like the picture below.

Day 5: cooking
On day 5 I made vegetable broth. I've been making my own regularly for almost a year now and really like it! It's easy to do, just a bit time-consuming, and it's very satisfying to be using self-made broth in your cooking. For this batch, I used only leeks, onion, celery and carrot. I'll season it later, when I use it in a dish.

When the broth was finished, I filtered out the vegetables, separated the liquid into smaller batches and put those in the freezer. So whenever I need vegetable broth in the future, it will be right there.

Day 6: making laundry detergent
I did another batch of conkers and then my jar was full, so I was finally finished! I haven't tried the laundry detergent yet, but I will soon. To use it, you have to put a spoonful of the conker bits into water until it turns into a white, soapy liquid. Then you have to filter the conkers out and throw the liquid in your washing machine. Other people who've tried it said it worked really well, especially on lighter coloured clothes. I'm very curious!