On Friday evening and Saturday morning, I got to take a bookbinding workshop. I’ve been wanting to learn to sew text blocks onto tapes, and that was the focus of the class, which was awesome, but there was so much more.
We were exposed to techniques that I’ve never even heard of or read about:
1) we made zigzagged end papers to help stabilize the attachment to the cover…
2) we pared leather… my attempt wasn’t all that successful, but it’s not something I’ve ever done, so the lack of success was both understandable and acceptable.
3) we sandwiched our covers. That text block is not going anywhere.
When I take these workshops, I’m more interested in being exposed to new techniques than I am in making a masterpiece. If it’s my first time trying something, I reserve the right to create a disaster. Anything other than a disaster is icing on the cake.
This was not a disaster. There’s a lot of room for improvement, though. It will require quite a bit of practice before any of these skills can actually become useful to me, and that’s fine.
Carmen Yount 