bookbinding etsy street team storque article!

exactly what the title says.

hooray for best! :) very exciting for the team! and i'm personally excited about our upcoming team challenge... halloween is the bestest holiday evar!!!11!1! hahaha...

on a personal note, s-bucks hasn't quite worked out my schedule yet, but i just started interning at effinfunny, sandeep parikh and leah mann's production company. pretty awesome! :) i'll be working on my first shoot this weekend, woot!

playing with bindings!

i recently joined the firefly-based big damn crafters street team on etsy, and for may's team challenge about unification day i created this book:

i used a stab binding method (which was a problem because i used my screw punch for the leather cover but not the pages, i used my awl for those and i probably had way too many because it was a pain in the ass to get the damn needle and thread through. i actually ended up breaking a needle, eesh!) as a way to bind (har) the old western and asian styles together into one book. i like it, but i don't know that i'll do it again ;) my first leather book, and also my first binding style other than the hardbound kettle stitch method! i haven't listed it on etsy, because the plan is to give it to my dad for father's day. :D

i did list this book on etsy, however:

i used a coptic binding method (ish... i think the first and last rows weren't done quite right because after i was done i compared it to eva's book that i received in the first best book swap and it looks like i should've looped the stitches a little more) based off of a tutorial i found online (did the same for the stab binding). i rather like this one, i don't think i could've done much different in terms of tension on the stitches because it does sort of pop open when standing up but it lies flat and i believe it's the paper itself that's doing the opening, not the stitching! so that makes me happy :) plus i've been wanting to use my papyrus for quite a while and i'm really glad it looks so awesome with the marbled paper (yep, same paper as used in the background for the leather book hahaha)!

world book day challenge!

here is my entry for the bookbinding etsy street team's world book day challenge :) it's based off of shakespeare's romeo and juliet... i call it "story of woe" (har so clever!). i bound it with pretty italian paper and bookcloth, and then gold leafed the letters "j" and "r" on each side, so you can write in it from either direction (or both!). it's got black paper, which is always fun. for some reason it feels really awesome to hold in my hands, and i was tempted to keep it but i've been needing to post something up on etsy and it was kind of a relief to finally update *something* haha!