I love books. I love the texture of paper, and printed words and old musty book smells. I have been collecting a large amount of vintage books over the past couple of years, with the intention of using the paper in my mixed media. But what to do with the actual books themselves? Make your own notebooks, sketchbooks or diaries out of them. DS1 and I worked on some as a school holiday project, here’s some of our steps.
Gutting the books of paper, then trimming old sketchbook pages to make signatures.
Checking the size of the signatures.
Stitching the signatures carefully together.
The finished book signatures.
Adding a coat of glue to help hold things together.
Adding the end papers to the text block.
My first finished text block.
My first finished book. I included two marker ribbons also before gluing the block into the cover.
As well as blank sketch paper, I included pages from children’s books…
My own Gelli print artwork, packaging paper, sheet music…
Vintage maps, dictionary pages and scrapbook paper.
DS1 found a series of Youtube tutorials by SeaLemon for the basic construction and the whole process is so simple we have already made several books together. We have a community book op-shop locally that often throws out these old books, as no-one will buy them and they have limited space. There’s a huge amount of possibilities for these old treasures, turning outdated books into something both useful and beautiful.
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Naomi
Will you be selling any of these in your etsy shop? I love it!!
Cassandra
Naomi, I am definitely working on it…. just sourcing the right weight of sketching paper at the moment, something not too thick but with a nice drawing surface as well. I’ll be sure to advertise them on my site as well, so feel free to subscribe!