I burst through the door of bookbinding at 4pm yesterday after a long day of working in the Studio and announced to Helen that I had to sew a text block immediately or I would explode.
She had some good big offcuts I’d been waiting to use and throughout the afternoon I chipped away at the project until I had a finished book. This will be Martha’s Christmas present, and I chose all the scraps of fabric that reminded me of her. Martha, if you’re reading this, CLICK. AWAY.
I learned a lot while sewing this, which is just so mad, considering that this is a format I’ve now done a few times! I found running the thread through beeswax a few times doesn’t only help lubricate the thread a bit, it also loosens it up right off the spool. Otherwise, it twists itself into tangles and kinks trying to spiral back into loops.
If I bound this again, I would use thinner thread on the signatures, and possibly sew even more signatures on. A book this big needs width to give it presence. I was surprised by how well the fabric stuck on using heaps of my tacky glue, because I was really expecting that to be the miserable part. Even the thickly knitted white flowers stuck quite easily.
The green ribbon I just pulled straight out of my scraps drawer. I nearly laughed out loud, using something from my “scraps drawer”, feeling like a scrapbooking mum.
I’m loving using scraps or things that I have to hand for these books. They almost build themselves, and it takes a lot of the cost and decision making out of it for me. I still get to build something that’s unmistakeably mine (I can hear Helen calling it one of my “Gemma Specials” in my head right now), but using up old materials and giving them new life.
SEASIDE ILLUSTRATION 