A Set of Notebooks

I recently went to a course on creative book making with Angie Hughes at the Ledbury Artplace here in the UK. http://www.angiehughes.com/ The books I made during that weekend are on loan for an exhbition at the art place so I can't show them here. I belong to the Yahoo group "Art by the Month" http://groups.yahoo.com/group/art_by_the_month/. We share art with people who have signed up for a period of 6 months. There are 5 of us in the current sign up so I am making 4 pieces a month. For my March contribution I decided to use my new "skills" and make a notebook for everybody.

I have a few boxes of A4 coloured plain paper and I decided to use browns and creams. I have a paper cutter with a few fancy blades so I used that to cut the paper to size (A5). I then created several signatures. The signatures were then joined together using PVA and strips of fabric. The second diagram at http://www.discorder.ca/oldsite/regulars/05maydiy.html shows the idea. I also glued a strip of fabric along the spine with a bit to either side. These pieces of fabric are used to join the pages to the cover later on in the process.

The covers are made with Calico and iron on vilene (on the inside). All of them have had plasterer's scrim stuck on the calico. Some of them have also had tissue paper (from dress making patterns - it has a particular quality) gluded onto the calico. Some of the covers have also had some machine stitching to give some texture. Once the texture was complete, the covers were painted with white gesso. They were then sponged with acrylic paints - Burnt Umber, Red and Yellow. Finally, some liquitex gold acrylic paint was dabbed on in places, and one of them had flowers painted on thickly.

One of the books was scanned and I used my Corel Painter program to create a bouquet marbelled image for the end papers.

The inside of the covers are made with mill board (compressed cardboard such as you find on the back of notepads). The spine was made of thin card. The instructions in the bookmaking link I gave above states that you should glue the whole of the cover to the board. I didn't do this, in order to give it some flexibility, only the folded in fabric on the inside of the board had any glue on it.

The pages were then laid on the spine and the binding tapes were glued to the inside of the cover. The second set of binding tapes were not glued to the book until the first set were properly dry.

Finally, the end papers were glued in to cover up all the construction elements.