Sewn Boiled Paper Book

If you have read the previous post you know how the following beautiful book pages came to be, this post is all about the sewing and decoration process.

I also noticed that all my pictures turned out way too big for my blog layout so I am reducing the size, hopefully not loosing any of the details.

The following pictures show the holes in the folio (a single page is a folio, a few pages together are a signature) and also in the inner spine of the book cover. I wanted to give the spine a little extra stability and glued an extra piece of sturdy paper inside. I then used a dremel type of handheld drill to make the holes in the cover and in the folios, the watercolour paper is just a little too thick for a needle to go through.

When I make a book I always enjoy the sewing process the most, I think I used a long stitch here, with waxed embroidery thread and added wooden beads on the outside of the spine.

The finished book from the outside, the wood beads on the spine with tied long stitch binding and the closed cover with deckled feature edge. The blue tint on some of the leaves is from red beech leaves. We cut a green beech tree a few years ago and it came back with green and dark red leaves. The red always turns blue, you can try it out with most red berry tea varieties as well. The teabags start out red and turn bluish during drying. I wonder what would happen to paper boiled in red berry tea?

I also made sure that I placed folios next to each other that also had been together during the boiling process because I wanted to have continuity while flipping through the finished book. I will give a few examples here of this continuity.

Two adjacent folios, one mirroring the patters of the other.

Same folios, this time with the deckled cover opened. I took care to place leaves under each deckled cover as well.

The whole folio opened, revealing another mirroring pattern.

The next adjacent folios, the one on the left is the one from the pictures above.

Same thing here, deckled cover opened...



And the full folio inside visible.

This is what I meant by continuity, even though each folio is totally unique they are still connected to each other by the mirrored patterns of their outer covers with their neighbouring folios. 

Here are a few more lovelies...

And now all I have to do is fill this book with some awesome art. And to be honest that is a little scary to think of because I love how the book turned out, what if I mess it up with a drawing? The only think to keep in mind now is that without its intended content the book is still incomplete and unfinished...