My Life Book 2014 Journal

I have put the book block together for my Life Book journal. It is going to be a case bound book because I am using the cover from an old novel. This is not a style of binding that I do regularly, I usually use coptic bound, longstitich or secret Belgian binding, all of which open to lie flat.

I think the novel cover and end papers are so nice, that I want to use the whole cover. The other reason that I love this cover for this particular project is that opening up the book is like looking inside of me.

The process I have used was to cut a bunch of different types of papers to the correct size and put them into signatures of between 2 and 4 sheets each. I have punched enough holes to sew them on to 3 tapes.

While I was sewing them onto the tapes, I dipped down to the previous line of sewing and caught the stitch below because I am hoping this will make the whole thing a bit more stable.

A really simple explanation of the process can be found here. And Sea Lemon has great video tutorials of all sorts of different bindings on youtube including this one on hard back books.

I still need to put some mull fabric across the spine. This will help to support the tapes when they go under the end papers.

I have started to use the book block though. I completed the two exercises from week 1 of Life Book, the warm up and my Inner Artist Guardian. I am really pleased with my results. I am following along fairly closely with the lessons at the moment, because I am still new to all of this, but I hope to develop my own style as the year progresses.

It used to be that I just got the joy out of making the books, now I want to fill them up. It never used to be that way. That is part of the reason I decided to go with a journal rather than single sheets. Also, I can carry it with me everywhere and look at it whenever I want to, which is great, because I can't stop staring at the beautiful angel. I am still amazed that she came out of me!