I bought a dozen small scraps of bookbinding leather last year and never really got around to using it. They are really small – about 20cm square, so are only good for small books, infils and the like.
I drew the symbol from an asemic character I had been playing around with, cut it out of thin card and glued it to the front board before gluing on the leather.
The the edges were carefully ‘worked’ with a bonefolder to get a good bond and create the clean line around the character.
The banding on the spine is fake – those are strips of card and not raised sewing.
The endpapers are a very wrinkled handmade paper. I didn’t make this paper but it has been sat in my scraps box for ages.
So how small is it? 86 x 67 mm actually, just enough to sit in my palm…
I find the bonefolder ‘worked’ edges very satisfying on the eye. They’re like an ‘outer stroke’ layer effect in photoshop, but real. Lovely.
Ha ha! Just like a graphic designer – always describing things in ‘AdobeSpeak’ – I find myself doing this far too often!
Actually, it’s very satisfying to be able to ‘work’ the material like this; it is much more forgiving than paper which will keep every impression visible. The leather needs to be ‘coaxed’ into shape, firmly, but carefully, and takes a bit of time before it decides to keep the new shape it has been given. I may do a more detailed blog on this process soon, a step-by-step type post, showing the whole sequence. I know I am not doing this the ‘proper’ way, with rabbit glue and all the specialist tools and will very likely come under fire from the purists, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere!
‘Proper’ way or no ‘proper’ way, you’re still making books and the end result looks nice! I look forward to the post
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