Jeansbooks final post – Making of and Listing

I have been blogging in great detail about the making of seven Jeansbooks in the past week. If you missed it, you can find Part I here, and Part II here. I stopped at the point where I had cut and assembled all pages for the four larger books, and had assembled, but not yet cut the pages for the three smaller books. That was the situation on Wednesday the 7th. On Thursday my studio time was quite limited, as I spend a huge chunk of time in school talking. In the remaining time I sorted through the colourful signatures I had assembled the day before and pressed over night.

At first I used up all the signatures I had. – But then decided that there is such a thing as a too chunky book. – And I am still left with a good selection of what could become exercise books. – I’ll see what I do with them later.

Then I cut the pages to size. The jeans for the smaller books were worn by my children in an earlier life and range from size 2T to 3-4 years, and thus the books are not the same size. So I had to set up a jig like explained in the last post six times. – So nothing else on that particular day.

When I had to collect the kids, I threw away a handful of small paper strips (you can see them above). I guess this is extremely silly, but this it the kind of thing that I find so very hard to toss. These cut-offs looked to neat, and I wish I had had a brilliant idea to make something from them. I pondered weaving and all such, but they are quite short. In the end I took a deep breath and tossed them.

This is where the promised procastination started. Up until here I really made the best of the time I had, but the next day, Friday the 9th, was pretty much completely wasted. I started off with all the covers and pages neatly arranged on my worktable, ready to be bound.

Of course now my studio needd tidying up. It really did. Every hour or so, I thought now would be a good time to decide, how and where to place the stitches on the book’s spine, to pre-punch holes in the quires and covers. – And then I found something else to tidy up. Punching holes is something that requires an effort from me. – It can’t be undone, it is the most irreversible step other than the very first cutting of material. But the cutting is the first step. If I make mistakes now, I have wasted so much time and effort. Before I do it, I’ll rather quickly check Facebook…

And thus it took me four hours on Friday to get to this stage: The covers and pages for the first book pre-punched. Ready to start binding.

The time stamps on my photos tell me, the photo above was taken about 90 minutes later – what progress! And it was time to pick up the kids from school.

But the next day then worked like a breeze. Once I get started, I am actually quite quick. Just the sewing of a large book takes me about 30 minutes, 20 minutes for the small jeansbook. Punching holes maybe takes another 30 minutes, so that I can finish a book in a little less than an hour, once work so so far prepared as it was. And so, although I only worked half a day, I finished the first three books on Saturday.

Sunday is a family day (established since the kids entered school) and we spent the day as a family with neither of us working. On Monday I was really busy with thread, but on Tuesday morning I then bound two more books and pre-punched the remaining two. Which were bound on Wednesday morning:

Next up: Photographing and listing on Etsy. Which involves pricing. You observed now first hand how long it took me to bind the books. How do you price them? Well, I do want to sell them. I hope to earn me some Christmas money from them, and so put them at a price that I hope is fair for both me and the buyer. I’d be happy if you visited my Etsy shop to have a look, and maybe buy or share.

I really enjoyed binding books once more. I should do it more often. Actually I decided to do it more often. It is a shame that I didn’t make any journals in the past two years or so (outside commissions).

Unfortunately the gallery function doesn’t work with images that are not stored on this site (and due to a software glitch I cannot load images to this site anymore) So here are more photos embedded in large. If you go to ipernity (or Etsy of course) you’ll find more images to look at.