Non-Adhesive Interwoven/Interlocking Structures

This past weekend I completed part two of a two day workshop sponsored by the Southwestern Ontario chapter of CBBAG.  The workshop instructor, Jan Taylor, guided us through three new structures and helped us to adapt one for our own project.

We tackled a Buttonhole Binding (which was the one that I used for my personal project), a book with an interlocking cover and and accordion style book whose cover was interwoven to the end pages.
For the buttonhole book, we created nine signatures that were sewn to the cover using a buttonhole stitch at the top and bottom of the spine.  The mid portion of the spine was cut away to show the signatures.  Already I can see a lot of decorating possibilities for this one.  We used a heavy weight paper for the cover.  The cover was the same height as the text block and the length of the cover was 2x the width of the text block + the width of the spine + the width of fold-ins on both the front and back cover.  The width of the fold –ins was left to our own discretion.

The accordion style book used a long strip of text wove paper 6” x 30”.   This was divided into 8 equal sections.  We used two colours of paper for the cover.  Each cover was 2x the width of the text block + 2x .5” fold for spine + the width of a fold –in for the cover. The folded spine sections  for the front and back covers were divided into 7 equal sections.   Every other section was folded back to be used to attach the text paper to the cover.  I used aqua and brown for my cover paper.  On the aqua cover, the 2nd, 4th, and 6th sections were folded back to be used to attach the text.  On the brown cover, the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th section would be used to attach the text paper.  The remaining sections of the spine fold were woven together using a piece of tyveck to form a checkerboard like spine.  This weaving together of the spine and the woven of attachment of the cover to the text paper, was challenging.  In end, I used my micro spatula like a bodkin to pull the tyveck through the folded sections. 

The sewn text block of the third book used tyveck strips as the tapes.  These were coloured and decorated using Derwent Inktense Watercolour pencils.  Tyveck absorbed the colour well and provided strength to the structure.  Slots were cut into the cover and the tyveck strips were woven through to attach the cover and the decorative strip of handmade paper that was placed over the spine area of the book.  Another decorated strip of tyveck was used as the strap to keep the cover closed.  It slipped into a space between the strip of handmade paper and the other two tyveck tapes and effectively held the book closed. 

No adhesive was used for any of these structures.

My personal project was covering a book of poetry for a friend.  I had a richly textured paper for the cover and I was looking for an interesting binding.  I chose the buttonhole binding and then added hardward to the cover for the book label.