So, sometime back I watched this video and it got me interested in bookbinding and rebinding. I looked at a few videos, and tracked down a self-contained kit on Amazon. Thoughts and pictures below.

The starter project was just hole-punching and sewing a basic pamphlet of one signature (set of folded leaves of paper) and its paper cover. (See picture below) It went pretty well, all things considered. I found the included needle with its giant eye and the coarse linen thread coated with beeswax easier to work with than clothing thread.

Second project, a flip notebook assembled with Japanese stab binding was a bit of a mess. There’s a place in the instructions – which some of the Amazon reviews mention – where what the instructions are telling you to do something that conflicts with the pattern you’ve been following up to this point. You’re better off following your instincts at that spot.

I also hadn’t cut the paper as well as I should have before starting, which meant that I had to hitch one of the stitches up out of the way to trim it on the guillotine after assembly, which made for some loosey-goosey stitching (see upper right corner in picture below). The tying-off knot on the front came out ugly enough that I decreed that the back, with the red stain in the upper right corner from where I stabbed myself with the needle hard enough to draw blood, was now the front. Still, I was pretty happy with the results, and have been using it as a kind of craft notebook for later projects.

Project three proved to be a more difficult challenge, but more about that next week.