Wedding Cards: Book and Book Box

 This summer 'im outdoors and I have been married 10 years!

It doesn't feel that long ago, but then I think of all the things that have happened since and I guess it really is.

 

After everything had settled down again after the big day and I started to put things away, I found we had a mass of beautiful cards filled with love and best wishes from friends and family.  I didn't want to just stick them in a box in the loft.  But what to do with them?

 At some point I got the idea to bind them into a book, so you could open them and still read the nice messages inside.  But at that point it was a bit beyond anything I'd ever done before.  I had a kinda idea, but nothing solid, so they just got put away in a box.

Then last year I did an online bookbinding course and that started to solidify my ideas and so I finally decided to give it a go.

I found some wedding gift wrap in a shop on offer so bought a couple of sheets, I wish I'd bought another now.

 

And I found the purple card and paper we used for all our wedding invites etc in a cupboard. 

Last autumn I started by folding concertinas out of the A4 purple paper.  Then I sewed some of the cards into the valley folds.  It did work, but it was hard to do with the cards flopping all over the place and I was having second thoughts.  Thr project got put on hold.

 

But I was determined to finish it.  Beside everything was in the way.  I wrote myself a motivational note (Just F**king Do It!!) and I finally got on with sewing the cards to the concertinas. 

It was hard, but I stuck an audio book on to listen to, and so instead of thinking about how hard it was I was listening to the book and suddenly all the cards had been sewn in.

 

Normally I'd have left them like this and just added a cover, but the cards were heavy and had a mind of their own, so I clamped them up and stuck some scrim along the spine to give it some structure.  This worked very well.

Now everything wasn't flopping around it was much easier to sort out the cover.  I used black bookcloth and some of that gift wrap for the end papers.

 

When I'd been tiding up I found a spare photo of me and 'im outdoors and decided to stick it into the front cover.  It just makes this book more personal to us.

With the book made I then made a book box to hold it and keep everything safe.  Although quite a simple project I forgot how much resources it takes up and had to buy more grey card and as I said I wished I'd had more gift wrap.

But now it's finished I am so pleased with it!  It's probably the project I've thought about for the longest - always at the back of my mind, so it's sort of a relief to have finally finished it.  And just in time for our anniversary.

And the study has been cleaned and tided and ready for my next project.  All in all it feels like a very safisfing outcome.