Remember the Woodworking Post

Do you remember the wooden cover I posted a while back .... the one from my woodworking course?  Well, I finally made something with it and the picture was downloaded when I downloaded the ones from BookBinding III.  Do you remember what it looked like?

Well, here is what the finished book looks like.

After staining the oak ovals, I gave them a coat of varathane and lightly sanded them and them put another coat of varathane on them.  Then I put eyelets into the predrilled holes.  Because the wooden covers were thick, I was able to insert an eyelet into each side of the cover. 

I drew a template to cut out my signatures for my text block and sewed them over leather thongs that were then laced through the centre four holes of the covers.  The middle two thongs were tied together as you see in the picture above and used as the book closure.  The upper and lower thongs were threaded through the remaining eyelets and glued down. 

I had a single earring and used that as the decoration for the cover.  I traced that onto the book and then carved a groove that would allow me to embed the medallion into the wood for gluing.  I didn't like the bald look of the brass meeting the wood, so I used some silk cord and glued that around the circumference of the medallion.  This seemed to give it the definition is was missing.

I can't say that this book was well designed because I drilled the holes in the wood without really thinking through the book design.  That sort of came after and is not the way I would do it in retrospect.  I definitely put the cart before the horse in this project and most of the time I was working out how to make things work.  In the picture with the book open, you can see the problem I ran into with using an oval.
I still like the idea, though.  I'm just going to think it through from the perspective of a book first, before I cut the wood.  I'm not going to let the power tools go to my head.