Friday 5 November 2010

Bookbinding Evening Class wk6

I was incredibly tired last night, so didn’t seem to get much done in the class myself. But that didn’t matter too much as there was so much else to watch.

First Sarah showed us how to make paste paper.
You start with a small quantity of paste, similar to the recipe here, and mix it with acrylic paint to get the desired colour.
Once it is mixed well you apply it to your paper reasonably thickly and then the fun begins. Using anything at all you can make marks in the paste. It could be as simple as folding the paper in half and getting a stippled effect when you pull it apart, or more complicated by dragging an old comb or fork through it. Looking in the books Sarah bought to the class I saw how people had added extra colours to their paste after applying it to the paper, or drew on the paper with wax crayon first.
Once your paper is dry you only need a small piece to cover your book with, so can choose the very best part of the design.

Also being tried out last night was the stylus tool and the heated letters, both used for titling books with coloured foils, normally silver or gold.
To use the stylus tool you start by making your design on tracing paper – in this case the design was copied from the original cover of the book.
You then tape the foil and tracing paper to you cover in the desired place and using the heated stylus copy out the design. We were all very impressed how well the design came out.
The other way of doing this was to use letters similar to those used in a printing press which were mounted on a piece of long thin metal with a wooden handle. These were also heated and then pressed into the foil on to the cover of the book. Any excess was rubbed off with a little sandy brick dust and again we were impressed with the end result, especially as it was much harder to get them straight and the spacing right when doing this by eye.
This will be similar to how I get my design stamped on my books, if we can get the stamp to work properly.
All in all a good evening.

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