Faux Asian Stab Exercise Book

1. Faux Asian Stab Exercise Book - Intro: Hello, Ed, welcome to Biketiga Studio to this workshop today on how to make This kind of Jotters. My name is Kokotska. I've been binding books since as a teenager. I started making journals. I've been running Buketiga Studio for almost 20 years now. In two years, it's going to be 20 years that I've been I'm doing nothing a books in my professional life. This is a project that's actually very close to my heart. As far as I'm aware, I invented this binding, and I'm the only one who's making them quite like this. So you might wonder what's actually special about them. So if you look at VitigePattern here, this might look familiar. It looks a bit like these Asian step Step bindings, like this year, for example, I love to make these. These are perfect for telephone notes. But the stitches go through the width of the book block here. And if you open the book, it wants to fall shut again. Whereas these here, they open differently. There are so called codices. So there's a page that is folded in half, and it hinges on that fold. So you can open them like this. You couldn't you couldn't open that like that. And yeah, you can open them like you're used to from your box, and they will stay open on your desk, which has clear advantages. It's made with two types of stitches. We first have this decorative stitches here, which is like paper embroidery, really. And then we're going to add the pages to this cover. The class is suitable for beginners, for everyone who likes to do things a little bit differently and is ready to have a little adventure in bookbinding. It's a perfect project to use up decorative papers you're flying around, whether this is from watercolor projects or card making exercises. It's a perfect user upper kind of project. The tools we're using is a pair of scissors. Something to cut your paper, like steel edge and sharp knife is often better suited for making clean cuts than scissors. You don't need anything special. And like all my classes, it's made up with first lessons that takes you to start right away. The next lesson after this we'll start with gathering materials in the house, getting everything ready, and then we start stitching. And then at the end, there are several bonus lessons so that if you do need to catch up with some theory and some background on something, you can catch that up in the bonus lessons, and I'm a very strong believer in learning by making mistakes. So there are some trouble shooting sessions where I show you what to do when something goes wrong, how that look like and how to fix it, this kind of thing. Yeah, I think there's nothing else I need to tell you. I could ramble on for hours now about this. But let's rather get started making the book. 2. Lesson 1: Making the Cover: Welcome back. I'm glad you decided to join me in making this book. So this is what our book is going to look like, and let's dive right in with starting to gather materials you need to make this for yourself. This is a very casual kind of jotter so you can use all kinds of materials that you have around, and you like the look of, I have here some pages that I took out of a magazine. They will do really well for covers. I also got some wallpaper samples, and you can use those as covers. I probably do a mix of different approaches to show you. The next thing we need is something to reinforce the spine. Like, this is one of the magazine pages I used, and this is a bit of book fabric. You can sometimes buy fabric type that would work very well. And you can also use just a piece of fabric you have lying around. I'm going to show you how to do that. The only important thing to keep in mind is to always align the fiber direction parallel to the spine for whatever you're doing with this binding or any binding really because that influences heavily how the cook will behave and turn out. If you don't know about fiber direction yet or you need a refresher, you'll find that in the other lesson. Yeah, so let's get started. So the thing you need to do now is to pause your video, to find your cover materials, to find a little bit of fabric to put on the spine in a paper, and you need inside pages. I forgot about them. For the inside pages, you can use any kind of paper you want to use for your daughter. You can use just office paper if that's what you have. Just remember, again, we need to take care of the fiber direction. So if you're using photocopying paper, you're probably going to make an ASIx book like this one here. You can also use any kind of artist grade paper you want to use. If you're using very thick paper, you're going to use fewer pages on the inside, and vice versa, if you're using very thin paper, you can make more pages into your book. These are the covers that I chose. This one is an origami paper. It's slightly glossy and feels like maybe thicker gift wrap. You can see me folding it just with my fingers here. You could, of course, use a bone folder. And I decided to pair it with this leftover quilting fabric. I just eyeball how white I want my spine piece to be. And then I measured this to be roughly an inch 1.5 centimeters and decided to cut it 5 centimeters wide. So you, of course, need to double this up. I prefer to cut my fabric with a rotary cutter like this one. You don't need to do anything to the edges because everything is glued down, it won't unravel or at least not a lot. Just mark off here marking off 5 centimeters, and I'm cutting this to size. The length of the strip should be a bit more than the height of the cover. So the cover, obviously, or maybe not obviously, was it came in this sheet, and I already wanted that as a cover, I just folded it. So I didn't have to cut it. And the strip is a bit longer than the height of the signature. I'm going to show you another one. This one is light card stock. It's a bit thicker. And I'm testing here for paper grain, and this is the grain direction. It started out to be an A four paper, so this would be a very skinny book. This happens also when you're using Office paper. Office paper has the same grain direction, and I decided to rather make an A six book instead of making the very skinny one. It's the same format as this prepared one. I already know I want my spine to be as white as the ruler, and you can see that I marked the fiber direction of the fabric there. And it just so it's a bit too small. I will have to trim the covers a little later. But, yeah, I went for that one, so I'm cutting two spine strip for these pages. And then I made a couple more, but I also want to show you how the bookbinders tape looks like. It comes in these rolls. It's the same bookbinding fabric on the other side, but has the self stick backing. It curls a lot, but I also again, I just cut a strip that is a bit longer than the height of my cover. So next, I'm going to show you how to attach that to the covers. The first thing I do for all of these is to fold them on half so that you can really see where the middle is. We want to center them properly over the fold of our covers. So we really need to see where the middle is and align the two middles. And for these fabrics, you need to reinforce this so that you can really see it. And then for this binders tape, the backing can be quite stubborn. You see me fumbling here a bit. But once it's off, it's a really nice tape, and it's not overly sticky at this point because the glue is pressure activated. So I'm finding the middle here. I find it easier to glue down one half first. So you see me rubbing on one half, and then the other and then to turn it around without it sticking, I use some um paper from a different sticker. I had just to put this on there, and then I can turn it around without sticking to my table. And then you need to really rub it hard. As I said, this is pressure activated, so it needs a lot of pressure to stick properly. I'm using a teflon folder here because it doesn't have any grease that could show on the fabric. And then you could turn them over, I guess, but I don't really like this for this structure. I prefer to cut this off flush. With a straight edge and a knife again, and then always put it somewhere where it doesn't accidentally stick to another cover. Both sides. And then let's look at a different type of fine reinforcement. So this is my not paperbacked fabric. On paper backed fabric, you can apply glue directly onto the paper backcking, but this one here doesn't have anything. And if you have a stiff glue like that, sometimes you can apply it directly to the fabric without the glue coming through to the front. But it's safer if you apply the glue not to the fabric, but to another wipable surface. Like, I'm using these sheets of glass here. You could also use plastic or stone slab or whatever you've got and then place the fabric into it. If you have a thin glue, just putting it on top is enough. I found that to have the glue really adhere to the fabric, I actually needed to press it down quite a bit, which is unusual. But this is a fairly dense fabric and a fairly thick glue. It's not so difficult to see. When you lift it up a little bit, you just see whether it's coated on the backside, and if not, you rub it down a little bit more. So this is the cover I was going to use with it, and finding the middle in this fabric was hard. You noticed me not folding it down. The next one, I'm going to do that again, and I just had to eyeball it here. You see that I'm trying to find the middle by folding a little bit and then just align with the fold there. I have paper on my desk so that the glue doesn't stick to my desk. Open glue is really the enemy. You always have time, wipe your hands in between. Don't have glue on your fingers and make sure whatever you do, you never have open glue anywhere. So I'm rubbing on the fabric onto the paper. Again, I'm using my Teflon folder. Um I have a stack, and I just flip over the top so that I have a clean sheet of paper, no open glue on the surface. And then, again, just like with a fabric tape, I'm just cutting off the flush with a cover, and because this is a piece of fabric, I'm using my rotary blade. And again, every snip, this fabric has open glue on it, and I turn it around. Always make sure because it's so easy to have open glue somewhere and accidentally place something on top of it. Make sure you don't have open glue anywhere. So that's another one done. Let's move on to the paperbacked book binding fabric. Now, in this case, you'll see me deal with a little bit of a mishap. I don't want to hide this from you. Well, between projects, we start with a clean desk, new stack of waste paper to protect surfaces and catch any glue. This is my fabric piece. If you're quick, you'll see a mark about the grain direction that one correct. This is snipping it to size. There's the mark. I fold this in half so that it is easier to align the middle of the strip with a spine of the cover. And then I apply the glue with fabric, you can apply the glue directly to the backing. This is fairly stiff glue here. It could be a bit more liquid, and you have to go over the edge to make sure you really reach the edge. And then there it's happening. It twists under my fingers and moves into the glue. So there's now glue on the good side of the fabric. Wipe fingers, just carry on best you can. I'm aligning the spine with the middle and then rub on the first half of the cover. Bit nervous now. More fumbles. There, I got glue on my fingers, wipe fingers, and then turn this around, protect the surface of your desk, but you don't get open glue anywhere. I remember in the last minute to put the paper underneath. And then I first rub this on gently with my fingers, and that would have been enough, really. Um now I'm trying to clean up my mess with just water on a clean piece of fabric. This doesn't always work. So book fabric will water stain. And now I'm rubbing on this too hard with a teflon folder to not get grease on it, but that's why the glue is seeping out. That's a combination of too much glue with too much pressure. There's more glue coming out from underneath there. If you put this under pressing boards, you have to be careful so that it doesn't stick to anything. Now we need to trim off the excess fabric. You can do this with a straight edge and a blade, rotary blade or click blade. Of course, I find it easiest in cases like this for book finding fabric to just use scissors. And it looks awful now, but it will turn out right in the end. So it pays off to just keep going and try to be as clean as you can. Let's watch this once again to get a clean surface, I just add a sheet of clean paper there on top. And there's a new piece of book fabric and a new cover. Again, I snip this a little bit so that it's not too long. Fold in half to clearly mark where the middle is and the spine is going. You could do this with pencil marks, of course, if you prefer not to have the crease there. Glue up right to the edge to make sure it's properly covered. I'm using less glue here now this time. And there, oh, it almost went wrong, but in this case, it all stayed clean. More clean paper on the top. Then find the middle, glue first one side of the cover, and then I turn it around to rub on the other side. I checked that this was still clean. And again, I'm using a Teflon folder because you could use a different folder or just your fingers. I find the Teflon folder best on fabric. It doesn't leave any stains and gives a lot of control. If you find any stray pieces of threads here coming from the fabric, whether it's paper backed or unbacked, that doesn't matter. At this point, you can easily snip them off, and the rest will stick. And now we just need to get rid of the overhang again. I'm using just scissors. And that's it for this cover. I'm going to do a couple more, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we start sewing. 3. Lesson 2: Make a template and Prepare for Sewing: With all the covers and spines prepared, it's time for me to take a closer look at the inside pages. Maybe you've already done this. I have a pile of leftover papers from other projects here, and I'm just matching which paper I want to put into which cover. I like to use up leftovers of other projects for these kind of simple jotters. And once you made a decision, just go by fields of how many pages feel good, and then we need to trim the head and the tail of our book. For that, I put the pages into the cover, and then with shallow cuts, cutting at most two layers at a pass. And using a straight edge, you can get a really clean cut on the single signature bindings. You see me here again, the pagers are inside the cover, and I'm just using a straight edge and the cover as a guide to cut this flush. There's no hangover of the cover. You want the pages and the covers to be exactly the same height. This is universally accepted as the book on Japanese book bindings by Kojiro Ikigami. Let's take a look at how this style looks like. So the most simple form is the fourhle binding, it looks like this. And there are variations, and I'm aiming for the look of this one here. This is the first jot I'm going to work on, and the first step is to remove the pages we've just added. For now we just need the cover. This is the one with the tape I edit, and the tape is 5 centimeters wide, and we're now going to cut a template that's the same size as the spine piece. You can take any kind of paper I used to contrasting color here so that you can see it. And it needs to be a little bit bigger vest than the spine. And I'm just direct measurements are always the best thing to do. You don't accidentally read a 543. I'm speeding up the video here. You see that I cut this to the right width, and then I'm using the jotter itself to cut it to the right height. We wanted the same size as the spine piece, and then we can design our decorative stitches on this template. You need four holes that should be evenly spaced so you take the width of the book. You divide it by five and end up with four holes there. I first mark this upper line that's formed by the stitches, and then I make my marks for the four main holes. You can put that line wherever you find it visually pleasing. Just don't go too close to the edge because you want to have a proper distance between all stitches so that it's less likely to rip. You could leave it at that or you add these smaller stitches in the corners, and for that, I half the distance between the edge and the first stitch, as well as the height between the edge and this marked line. Functionally, you're not forced to go half. You could do a different distance. I tried out here how it would look like if I went a little bit further up, but I didn't like it and ended up going half anyway. The template you find in the download section is going halfway. I found that this looks best after all. But yeah, as I said, if you design your own template, you can go wild. You also if you look up Asian bindings in the web, you'll find very fancy stitch patterns, and you could adapt this for your pamphlet here if you wanted to do that. Now I punch through the marked holes. That is what makes it easiest to really get it symmetrical on both halves. You remember this template just folded, and I want to mark the lines across the spine now. This is not just to see how it looks. We need to mark the intersection line of the spine with these. If you watch closely, you saw that I only did the first four major holes when I marked the lines. So now when I turn it around, I can see how it would look like without the small stitches in the corners and both are valid and fine to do. But I still prefer it with the stitches and so I also mark those intersection lines with a spine now. Take your time making this template. You can add as many auxiliary lines as you need to. You can make it again as often as you need to. When you're happy with your stitch pattern, slip in your covers, and then it's time to punch these holes through your cover. The all I've been using to make the holes in the template is actually not a proper all. It's just a book binding needle added to the handle of a paper scalpel, but punching through the book cover and some cardboard needs more force, and so it's better to use a proper all. Once you've done that, slip your inside pages back into your cover. Make sure everything sits there, neat and tight, slip in your template, and now we're pre punching the sewing stations, and these go exactly where these lines meet across the spine, which we have marked before. Now we're ready to take the inside pages out once again to add the decorative stitches to the cover alone. See you in the next lesson. 4. Bonus Lesson: How to use the downloadable template instead: To use the downloadable template, have your cover ready and measure the size of the spine piece. It's five by 14 here. And then on a computer, open a text document and include the downloaded template. Well, you have to download it first, and then it's on your device and you find it and it's in there. And then open the context menu and go to properties. First disable the locked aspect ratio because we want to distort it now. And then you enter the measurements you've just taken. It was five by 14. Okay. And then it automatically scales. And next we print it. And with the printout, we then meet again at the work desk. So we need to cut this out first. I like to use a steel edge and knife to make such long cuts, but you feel free to take whatever is useful for you. Maybe you would rather use scissors. That's fine, too. Thanks. And then we first measure that it's got the same size as the spine piece, just to be sure, and then you fold it across the marked line. It has two sides. This one is the one with the little corners, and there's another one that just has the four holes. Use either. And then to check that you folded correctly, the best test is to punch through these intersection lines where you want to make the holes in the cover and first check that they are actually symmetrical on both sides. Yep, they line up if they don't, if they came out somewhere completely different, and you just do it over. And you could use that side, of course, without these little holes if you wanted to do just the four holes. And then we proceed as if this was a newly made template. So next, I punch the holes through the cover. Flip this, and then it's best actually to pre punch these that makes it a bit easier. It's faster if you don't. You just enter the pages into the signature into the cover and get it all lined up properly with a template in the middle. And then you pre punch your holes there. Now it's done, and you can proceed with the rest of the lesson. No 5. Lesson 3: Decorative Stitching (Primary Sewing): We're adding the outside stitches on this book now. They are not purely decorative, so it should be a stable thread that you can't just pull with your hands. But apart from that, you have the full range, whatever you like to see on this. I'm going to show you a variety of different outcomes, what kind of thread you're using for this demonstration purposes. I'm using this embroidery thread, which is a silk thread. And I'm going to wax that slightly. And for this, you take a block of beeswax, you place your thread on it, and then you want to employ speed because the heat of the friction is what melts a little bit of wax into the thread. You don't if possible, you want to avoid scraping off cold wax because that just crumbles away later. So every pass just gets very little wax into the thread, but now it's squeaky. And it will so much better. Normally, I recommend using a short sewing thread that is easier to pull through. However, here you really want to use something that suffices for the whole decorative stitches, so don't make it too short. We start in a second hole from the edge going from the ugly side of the cover to the outside and pull the thread through such that a small tail is left hanging on the inside. There is the whole stitching pattern can be found in a document, by the way, and you'll see me go through slightly different order of the stitches here. Here, I'm wrapping around the edge and go in through the same hole again. Going through them in a different order doesn't matter at all. What's important is that these stitches, the one I'm making here now, this is an important stitch. You want all the threads that span over the spine. Those are really important because those are the functional parts of the sewing. The rest is decorative, and as long as you get them all in, everything is good and the exact order in which you stitch is not that important. When I say get all the stitches in, what I mean is the stitching pattern that you want to have is visible on both sides, and there are no gaps. All the connecting lines are stitched. I always start with completing the tailedge of my sewing. So the smaller square, the bigger square, and the diagonal lines. And once that's done, have a check that all the lines are there. So in this case, this diagonal there on the inside is missing, and correspondingly, this diagonal on the outside. So I'm stitching that you'll find yourself doubling up on yourself quite a lot. So this loop there. And then I'm done with a tail section, and I can move onto the right. As I said before, if you don't stitch in exactly this order, like I'm doing it here or in the file, it doesn't really matter that much. And it's possible but actually very hard to get it wrong. And with wrong, I just mean that you get in a position where you can't move forward without having too little or too few threads. We're moving now from the tail to the head and then complete the head pattern and move back to where we started to knot the threads there. And what you have to think about is you don't have to get the pattern complete while moving to the head because we're still coming back. What is important though, to keep in mind, all the time during stitching is to be very careful not to pierce your own thread. It seems superficial, and you might think at one point, what does it matter if the thread is in the right position and why shouldn't I just go through the but believe me, it's better not to do that for structural integrity, but also you just can't do any adjustments when you do this. Once the stitch pattern is complete, through each hole, the thread passes six times. And with each pass, it gets more difficult not to stitch through the thread. So be mindful of that and just take your time. I've reached the head of my pamphlet now. I like to go over the edge as soon as I can. And then I work toward completing the stitch pattern there at the head. So again, I have the large rectangle, the small rectangle, and the diagonal lines, and you need to complete this stitch pattern on the outside, on the inside so that all connecting lines are stitched. Out the stitching, you see that a part of the thread catches on the edges of the cover, on my sleeves, on the table. That's the curse of a long sewing thread and why I normally don't recommend using such a long thread. But as I said, it just doesn't look good if you have to attach thread on these decorative stitches, which are essentially embroidery on paper. On the outside, the pattern is now complete at the head, and I start moving toward completing the whole pattern. So I'm moving back toward the tail now, and on the way, I check on the outside and inside to make sure that all the connecting stitches are there. Yay, stitching completed. So the last connecting line is now established when you knot the threads. I like to pass my sewing and under the stitches there to secure them and just make sure the knot stays at this one hole. I make a simple double knot, and you can clip the end short. That completes the decorative stitching. 6. Lesson 4: Filling your Book with Pages (Secondary Sewing): So now we start sewing. I use the same thread that I used for the decorative stitches I use for sewing, but you could do something else. You will see it very slightly showing up here, but I'm going to show you in a different example how that looks like when you're using a contrasting thread. I feel with this light thread on the dark fabric, it looks best when you keep it simple and the same color. Again, we start at the second hole from the left. We're passing now the needle from the inside of the section to the outside of the spine, and you want to make sure that the two spanning threads you have there on the inside and outside of the cover that they're on the same side of the needle because we're going to move back in winding around them, and then you have two pieces of thread of the decorative stitching holding the sewing thread in place. So I'm moving over this spanning thread a little bit. It can be a bit fiddly here, and you have to take your time sorting through the different layers. Make sure you don't pierce your own thread and have the spanning threads on the right side. There's a little bit of sewing thread on the spine that you can see properly when you're sewing with a contrasting thread. And now on the inside, we have these two ends of thread hanging from the same hole. Now, pass the needle, again, from the inside to the outside of the spine through the last hole at the tail of your book there. And yeah, with the tighter stitches, it can be a bit harder to have the spanning threads on the same side. Be careful here that your sewing thread doesn't form any loops or kings anywhere between signature and cover or on the cover. It's important to take your time here and not rush the stitching. Again, you end with this little bead there. Now, tighten your thread and make a simple double knot here with a start and the current sewing thread. When knotting the threads, I like to incorporate the spanning thread there just to hold it really in the gutter. And what I'm doing here is that after the first knot, I just pass the needle under so that the knot is underneath the thread, and now the second knot is on top. Now, you could cut both threads. I'm going to show you later how to do that. I was a bit lazy with my knotting here, so I only cut one of the threads, and I pass with my sewing thread over to the next hole. And the same game, you stitch from the inside of the section to the outside of the cover, and both between section and cover and on the outside of the cover, you have a spanning thread and you want them both on the same side of your needle, and then you stitch back on the other side just like before. And we're doing that at all of the remaining sewing stations now. Now, all that's left to do is knot the end of this thread. And to do that, I pass the needle under the thread before to secure the end at that sewing station and make a simple knot. You can use the tip of the needle to help your knot stay at the place where you wanted to stay to have everything neat and tight. All done? I recommend leaving this under wait for a while for the signature to settle before we look into finishing the book because we haven't cut the frontage yet. Let me show you some alternatives on how to stitch and especially to knot this. For this book, I used a linen thread, a buttonhole thread. I'm threading the needle here with a darker thread. I wanted to show you the bead on the spine. I'll do that later. Let's concentrate on the sewing pattern here. First. As you can see, I started at the first sewing station at the tail of the book here, and I'm leaving an end of a thread that's a bit longer than I otherwise might have done that. But other than that, nothing changes the same principal action of going from the inside of the cover to the outside and making sure you wind around both spanning threads here and pull that tight. I'm doing that at all sewing stations now, one after the other passing from the tail to the head, and there I finished the last one. Everything gets tightened up. And now I have these two ends that I'm knotting together to keep this a bit more tidy. And in the gutter, I'm passing the thread underneath the sewing thread here. The disadvantages that over the whole length of the spine, the threat is now doubled, or maybe you don't even see that as a disadvantage. It doesn't matter for these small books, what you're doing. And I want you to know that you have different options and you can choose what you feel is most natural and beautiful to you. And the last one I'm going to show you is the one that I think is actually the best. You can see here, especially well how the decorative stitches on their own are not really secured. The spanning threads hold the sewing thread in place and vice versa, the sewing threads will actually secure the decorative stitches. Alright, so I'm sewing here with a waxed linen embroidery thread. And I start just like before at the second sewing station, you could do the first that the first and second are completely symmetrical with this method. I'm showing you here. The sewing itself always remains the same. You stitch from the inside of the signature to the outside of the spine, and you're careful to wrap your sewing thread around the decorative spanning threads. And it is a bit fiddly to get all the threads to do what they're supposed to be doing. So take your time and you first have these two ends coming from the first hole, and then you go to the second, or in this case, I started at the second, and I go to the first, I wind this around again, and then I end up in the middle with the two ends that I'm going to knot. And this is once again a double knot that's secured by the spanning sewing thread. And once the knot is done, cut both ends. And then you start over at the next pair of sewing stations and treat the third and fourth just like you did the first and the second, and you're doing exactly the same again. And then again with the fifth and sixth. This is why I think this is the best. It's the most symmetrical, and it looks most orderly, but it requires a bit more stitching and takes a few minutes longer than the first method I showed you. It doesn't really have any advantages over the second I showed you here. It's just personal, I guess, the second I don't like that much. This is a wax linen thread, which is slightly sticky, and therefore, if you just press it in a little bit and roll it a little bit against itself, that makes it look neat. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to give them the last finishing touch. 7. Finishing (Trimming, Corner Rounding, Attaching a Label): Although we finished stitching, we're not quite finished yet, we need to trim the for edge. Now, we already did the head and tail. Make sure the signatures don't creep underneath your fingers here. Well rested signatures work best, or I enforce this with a folder there. And then with shallow cuts, just like we did at the head and tail, you can cut this straight. I find it best to also trim off a small sliver of the cover to have it really everything aligned well. There it is now. Last thing to do is to think about a label. I like to use some of the inside pages for that. I feel that matches usually well. A thin strip would be quite fitting with the style, but I decided to use a ready made sticker label here that has the advantage that it won't warp the cover and can just stick it on, and that's it. Now I want to show you one example where I did glue on a label. So here, again, I'm using snippets of the inside pages. I just cut off the front. And yeah, I'm just trying out. You can place it on the cover and then try out different positions. Center near the top mostly works well in my experience. And then I'm using the same glue here that I also used for the spine, but I want to apply it evenly up until all the corners, but also as thinly as possible. And then the trick is, well, apart from get rid of all the open glue, of course, again, and then the trick is to wait for quite a while. The moisture in the glue curls the label a little bit. But while the moisture penetrates, it relaxes the paper more, and we want to wait until it's fairly straight again. With clean hands, stick it on there. I feel I could have stuck it on a little bit lower, but yeah, well. Don't try to fuss too much about all these details. If you're really unhappy with a choice you make for one book, you'll just make another and make it better in the next book. Next, I'll show you how to round the corners of your book if you want that. If you have a corner rounder, you can round the corners that actually looks quite nice. But, yeah, it's not necessary to round the corners. This one just has square corners. It's just a slightly different optic. And if you don't have a corner cutter, but you want to round corners, I have a little trick for you. You can cut the corner at an angle here. If you want to be very precise, you can measure the same distance from the corner. I think I did 1 millimeter, and you can measure and mark this and then cut it precisely. The method is exactly the same, like cutting the fore edge, but you need a really sharp knife here to be able to do this. And this is how it looks like. If you're very close to the corner, I think it was a millimeter I used, then it looks very much like a rounded corner. I actually prefer to just go by side rather than measuring here. If you look closely, you can see that the snippets on the desk actually are triangles. So this would be that result. On this one, I'm going to show you a different corner rounding trick. Take a coin as big a coin as you can get, I think, but it's a choice. And then use that as your guide and cut around the coin. You have to make sure you have the coin really sitting tangentially to the upper side edge, and you have to make sure it really stays in place. For me, it slipped here ever so slightly. But it kind of works, and it's more exaggerated round than with a corner cutter I had. But this, of course, depends on the type of coin you're using. You can actually see in the pieces that I cut off that this is, in fact, rounded. If you have a sharp pair of scissors, this can actually help to clean off a little bit if you have some grades. To finish off, let's compare. We have here our coin rounded corner, and then the cut corner and on top the professional corner rounded corner. I would say they all look fairly similar. There are side by side for you to see now. What I wanted to show you is how the thread looks different. This here, it's the same thread, but this one here is unwaxed and this one is waxed. It looks a bit different. You see all these little hairs stand out. They are integrated into the thread here. I prefer this, but this has other advantages. Dirt and dust does stick a bit to and wax and wax thread. This can be more appealing for other reasons. This one, I used a linen embroidery thread. This has a fairly high twist. It was an NM 63 thread. And I used the same thread for stitching and sewing. So you can't really see the bead very well. And what I'm picking at here are bits of felt, I think that sticks to the wax. I hand wax this one, too. For this one, I used a darker thread for sewing on the pages, and you can now see the bead on the spine there. For this, I use Crawford's wax linen thread like you would do for other book binding, but it's really too thick. You can see how it doesn't want to close well. This is a different linen thread in comparison, and this is just very bulky. This is how it looks like when it's too bulky. I also used a contrasting thread for the sewing, and with these thick threads, you can now see the bead really well. 8. Bonus: Troubleshooting: I did a bunch of these books now to film this lesson. I hope you have made at least one to or you're going to, and I very much hope that you'll be happy with what you produce right away. However, I also very much believe in learning by making mistakes. You can learn so much from making a mistake. So hopefully you can learn from mine, and I show you some of the things that might go wrong while you're trying to do this. Some of the things I call going wrong here might not be wrong as such. This one we've already seen it just doesn't want to close properly, and that's because the thread is really too bulky. If you have this one here, for example, this doesn't close for a different reason. This is just not well rested enough. If you press it along the spine and you'll notice when I'm holding it like this, it doesn't feel like there's a resistance, it's just coming back up and putting something like that under a weight for a while will help, and if it doesn't it might be because maybe there are too many pages in the signatures. This can also be a reason why it doesn't want to close. This here, however, when I'm pressing this with my fingers, I can feel that there's something inside that you want to take out and that's just the too thick thread. You can also see here already that this is not lying well, that's just because it's too thick. This one here, while I made it, it looked like the holes blew out quite a lot. I cut in some of how it looked like while I was making it. When I folded this finished cover open, you can already see there at the spine how this wants to lift up. That's the first indication. You can see where the holes punch in. I still looks good. However, where the holes come out, the book cloth lifted there and it looks like it just doesn't want to stick. This was due to the book fabric being quite old and the backing just coming off. This is also why this is fraying here a bit that can happen when you use up materials, of course, that you have some material weakness. It's important to remark that this is not a problem with gluing. The backing is glued down just fine, and with these book cloths, you rely on the fabric adhering to its backing. This is a material weakness, and there's nothing you can do about it save starting over. But you can see that in the completely stitched book, this actually settled down. It's worth to keep on going and withhold your judgment till the end. This one here just looks untidy, especially on this side. This here is to the top. These here seem to be slanted. What is that? Well, in part, it's imprecise pre punching of holes. For example, this one here is just too far to the left. This is why this looks doesn't come up straight. The sewing thread that holds the pages in place pulls the thread too far to the left. You really have to hit a perpendicular spot here on the spine and things like here, for example, this is also due to stitching and you can actually fix it a little bit by just sorting through the threads. So it's a combination of things that can be fixed just by also here. If you just because there are so many threads going through this hole and it matters whether they are sitting side by side or on top of each other. Also when a thread here is slanted, you can move these threads a little bit, at least. This one here moves better, and you can just try to keep them as straight as you can. Whereas these when they are fixed in a wrong position, you can't really do anything about it. But overall, this one is not wrong, just very untidy. Here is a hole that went in a wrong place. This isn't weakening the structure of the book is what I want to say. At least not a lot and you can of course still use it. Here, the thread is pulling too much and it's pulling at the edge. It's just made sloppy. It's if your book look like this, although you really tried hard, it's just a matter of practice. Try to keep the threads tension even and just to place them where you want them already during sewing and be very precise when cutting the holes in the spine. So as you can see, this book is not complete yet, not at all. I just finished the cover. That's where I used the origami paper, which is a little bit like firm gift wrap. It's glossy and the paper itself probably isn't best quality, actually, more importantly, other than the wallpaper, it reacts very strongly to water. This was the book where I attach the quilting fabric to the spine with the indirect gluing. And we took I took great care to make sure that the paper grain aligns. Yet when you look inside, there seems to be little creases. What is this, and why is this happening? This is because even though the grain direction of the fiber and the paper is going in the same direction, it's still there and active and the fabric is pulling a bit on the paper. And this is how it looks like after it settled very well, I let it dry under a weight and between absorbent paper, this is where some of the color on this paper actually came loose. This is just because it's, as I said, not a very high quality paper. It's this magazine pages where the color is actually printed on with some I don't actually know what printing colors, but it comes loose quite easily. This was wet and some of the color came off. But all said and done, you could use it like that. It's actually fine to use it. I think once this is stitched up, it won't actually look odd. But if this is bothering you, what you could do is glue something on the other side to even out the pull. It's always easier to have one material like this paper and glue something on both sides, sandwich it so that the pull and push evens out between the outer fabric and the inner fabric. I don't really like doing this with these bindings because if I put another piece of fabric down here, the spine becomes stiffer and it wouldn't be a problem with the movement of the spine actually. But I just don't really like when the transition from the spine to this less stiff paper is too pronounced. We want it to open completely and not this day stiff and not move properly. I would use it just like it is. But if you see something like that and it's bothering you, attach a second one best to do this immediately after. Before it's completely dry, if you did this once and you want to fix it now, you could put something on now. But for the next cover you're making, you already know you want to apply to, it's better to do this immediately while this one is still wet, you already put one here, and then you let it dry under a weight to settle completely, and then you get rid of all these ripples. This is this one finished now with just the simple four hole to give you an idea how that looks like. And yeah, the book works just fine. This one finally is the one where I got glue on the outside. If you look carefully, you can see here that it's a bit shiny. That's where the glue seeped out from under the cover while I was pressing it. This is where I got glue onto the fabric here, but it's completely gone now and invisible. This is how it looks like now. Let's look back at what happened when I made this cover. Well, there it's happening. It twists under my fingers and moves into the glue. There's now glue on the good side of the fabric. Now I'm trying to clean up my mess with just water on a clean piece of fabric. This doesn't always work. Some book fabric will water stain. There's more glue coming out from underneath there. Let me show you how it looks like when you get glue on fabric. There are essentially three different forms of glue damage you can have on fabric. Here you can see that this is shinier there. There it got completely, there was a blop of glue on there, which I didn't wipe off and just let it dry there and there's no way you can get this off. This is damaged. Can't do anything. This is the same when glue comes through the fabric from the other side. If you're using non backed fabric, it can happen that the glue seeps through the tiny holes in the fabric to the front and if that happens, there's nothing you can do. However, there's a different type of PBA damage like this one here. This was actually where almost dry glue got onto the fabric. This happens when you don't wipe your fingers and you have a residue on your fingers and then you grab it. For this, you can try something that I want to show you. This is washy tape. You need any low tech tape, and you stick this on top and rub it on best you can then you take this off and hopefully take a little bit of the glue with you. This didn't work. Painter's tape is usually what works best. Let's try this again. You need really good contact between the tape and the glue. Then it's lifting a little bit, but it is just hard. You can also try to dab at it. This works actually better. Generally, you can try a eraser. At this point, I would be ready to give it up. As you can see, it doesn't always work. But that's your best option anyway. What also can work is if you try to pick at these bits with a needle and try to lift them off. I think that was still very wet when I put my finger on it. But generally, PBA on book fabric, not a good idea. So make sure it doesn't happen. If for you, something doesn't go quite right and you can't figure out what it is, do feel free to enter something in the discussion, and we can altogether problem solve whatever is happening there for you. 9. Bonus Theory Lesson on Paper Grain: Paper is the most important material when bookbinding. Of course, you could be making leather tombs with wooden covers and parchment pages, but I dares that's rather unlikely, and you will use paper probably for your inside pages. You'll probably use cardboard on the covers, and you might even wrap these boards into paper again to have a paper cover. So understanding paper is very important for a bookbinder. Fortunately, we all have a lot of experience with paper in our everyday lives. However, it is much less uniform than you might think. There's the paper grain that's kind of hidden inside the sheet, and we're going to discover this here. And to understand what it is and where it comes from, let's take a look at the paper making process. Paper is made from a slurry that contains paper pulp, which itself consists of plant fibers mostly, and then different chemicals, fillers, and so on to make a specific paper. From this slurry, then the sheets are formed. And you might have seen this process for making paper in the medieval way, with a decel which is kind of a sieve where the paper maker collects some of the slurry and then shakes the sieve to distribute it as evenly as they can. And this is then transferred to be pressed and dried. Depending on how they shake the sieve, more fibers will orient themselves in one direction than in the other. But for handmade paper, the grain is usually not very noticeable. In the industrial paper maker process, however, there is a long sieve like a transporter belt on which the slurry is transported at high speed. And just like a poo stick in a river, on this belt, most of the plant fibers will orient themselves in the direction this belt is moving, and this gives a very pronounced paper grain. In an industrially produced paper like this, office paper, you can feel the grain direction simply by handling it. If you fold bend the paper without folding it, you'll notice that it puts a slight resistance to your hand and in this direction, the resistance is much bigger than in this direction. The fibers are mostly oriented in this way. Of course, it's easier to fold the paper if the fold falls between most of the fibers rather than when it breaks most of the fibers. Sometimes for whatever reason, it can be hard to tell even in an industrial paper or maybe you have a paper that doesn't have a pronounced grain, and then you can wet it from just one side to determine paper grain. Cut a piece that is not square and then wet it from one side and the paper will curl up immediately, but as you can see, it doesn't do so in a chaotic way, it forms this tube and the direction that stays mostly the same in this one direction, this direction here stays straight and this is the fiber direction, whereas in this direction, it has been curling and this is called cross grain. This is with the grain and cross grain. When binding books, we always want the spine to be parallel to the paper grain or other way around, the paper grain parallel to the spine, because all of the properties we've just seen, this was a long grain paper, that means the paper grain is parallel to the long side. If I bound from this a book like this, so the grain direction here is going like this. This would be called a book that's bound cross grain. Every book inevitably gets into contact with water. People sometimes think they could avoid it by not using water based glue or something like that. But there's moisture in the air and this moisture content varies. While it does that, the paper will react and it will move in small ways. And we have seen that in a paper like this, it wants to curl like this, right? So we have this paper. It's part of a large book that's hold together like this and the paper wants to move like this and wants to stretch in this direction. So it will tear on the binding, and in extreme cases, you can even tear the binding apart. But in most cases, it will just crinkle up and build out folds pretty much like this, then it's almost impossible to move and some books can be rendered almost inadib like that. Whereas if we bind it with the grain. If we have a book now that's bound like this with the grain, now that the moisture content in the air varies, the book will still work, but it now wants to curl like this and this direction stays the same, so it doesn't pull on the binding at all. That's perfectly fine. And even if it should build out crinkles like that, you can still open it very easily. No problem at all. So I hope you take away from this that paper grain and book binding is really important. The umbrella term would be fiber direction, and the fiber direction in paper is its grain direction. This comes from how the fibers really sit in the paper, and we can see it. When the paper gets wet, it will curl a little bit, and the direction is parallel to the direction which stays straight. When you're buying paper, a useful thing is that the fiber direction in a am will always stay the same. And therefore, it's really useful to note this on your am. So you only have to determine it once, and then you write it down on the sheet on the m and then you know for the future. Most printer paper, anything that is supposed to go into a computer printer will probably be long grain, so parallel to the long side. Yeah, that's This is the indication that you can wet the paper to determine grain direction. That's the easiest way to do, really. You can also tear it and fold it. But the easiest thing if you're unsure is to wet the paper to find out what the grain direction is. And I already mentioned that fiber direction is the broader topic. All kinds of materials that are used in book binding, have fiber direction, and in particular, also fabric, wood, cardboard. They all have a fiber direction. However, if you're using paperbacked fabric, then you can also wet it. And the grain direction, the fiber direction of that material is usual the fiber direction of the paper. In fabric, it's usually parallel to the salvage. I hope that's clear. Any questions, put them in the discussion section and happy binding. 10. Outro: Congratulations. You made it to the final lesson. I hope this means you made at least one book. If you haven't, I really want to encourage you to give it a go. There's nothing to lose, give it a try. And as a bonus for those who already feel bored because they feel like this is too straightforward, I want to show you this book I just made. Let's take a closer look. Sorry, I really need to tidy up my desk now. So this is how the book looks like. And it probably looks overwhelming, but it's really much easier than it might seem. The cover is one piece. It's a wallpaper sample, and the thread is a variegated thread here. And only the pattern with a big triangles there, that's a functional stitch, a little bit innovative, but just like a Asian step stitch would work. Then there are these slanted bits on the spine. And again, the big triangles there. And then these small triangles are just on top of that stitched decoratively. Now, you don't have to aim for quite as chaotic a look yet. Really, you don't just wanted to show you this to encourage you to experiment. I think that's really important. You can do almost everything here. You just need to keep the really important bits the same. And these are you need a thread that's going over the spine where you can anchor your signatures to because the pages the pages really just hang on to these crossing threads, so you need to have enough, and they need to be secured at the cover. And that's all. Everything else is up to you. I decided to give it a quite traditional look, but it doesn't have to look like that. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with, what covers you make, what choices of papers and thread you have, what you're going to do with the book. You can show all of us, inspire your fellow students get feedback from me if you post your project in the project section. If you like this lesson and this workshop, maybe you'll like my other workshops, too. If you want something that's more traditional book binding, you might want to go to do the indirect Techet or the coptic binding. And if you want something more experimental, you could take a look at the Book art one oh one. And if you want more Jotter styles, take another look. There are hardcover jotters, other simple jotters. There should be something out there for you. See you in the next course.