My First Cloth Covered Case Bound Book

Welcome Back

For those with long memories, you may remember I have made a case bound book a long time ago. This is my first voyage into real book cloth though and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

Case bound book, my first try with book cloth.

The covers are made from off cuts of mount board, the book is A7 in size and has 80 gsm text weight paper. I followed Sage Reynolds instructions for constructing the case and this is my first successful spine gap. I have always struggled to allow sufficient space for the spine. I struggled to hold everything in the right place to measure as Sage showed in his video, but it was well worth the effort.

This book was a triumph of ‘What if…’ I didn’t have mull to line the spine so I used thin cotton bandage🙂 turned out ok, I learnt to use a thicker end paper or apply less glue. This was my first book that was sewn onto tapes, or in my case organza ribbon🙂 I even had a go at a wrapped endband. I used the method shown in Peter Baumgartner’s video and wrapped book cloth around a cotton cord. This taught me I needed to cut my finished head band closer to the book than I did, but for a first attempt it was worthy🙂

Here is the book with some embellishment added🙂

These A7 sized books are perfect for practicing techniques, they are fast to sew, use minimal resources and you learn a lot in the process. They also will make perfect gifts at Christmas, they are small enough to pop in you pocket, so really useful.

Links

 

There are a couple of excellent channels on You Tube for book binding that I highly recommend for anyone trying this kind of binding for the first time.

Sage Reynold’s.  Sage’s videos are awesome! He has such an efficient workflow and his passion for the subject shows in the care he takes with his projects. I’m linking to the main channel, but the video’s I used for this bind were the ‘Making a Case’ one’s. There are also video’s on how to sew signatures.

Peter Baumgartner. Peter’s videos show the entire process from start to finish including the sewing, I used the method for the sewing but didn’t have spine cloth so finished my book using Sage’s method.

Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon

Billie🙂