Feeling Bookish

Now I will never starve. Ok, I really wasn't worried
about ever starving. I, like most people could probably
skip a few meals and certainly never miss them. What I'm
talking about is: I have learned a new trade. Bookmaking.
No, not running a numbers game or parimutuel betting. The
kind of bookmaking that involves putting pieces of paper
together with a cover and creating a book. Last week, Carrie,
who has made probably hundreds of books taught a class to
seven of us. We were responsible for picking out a cover,
material for the inside cover and we could buy paper from
her if we didn't have anything suitable. I brought a coffee
bag leftover from my favorite coffee anywhere...New Mexico
Pinion Coffee. I thought it would make a great cover.


As we were leaving our room for the class we skua'd this cool
hand-made paper that worked out really well for the inside
cover. It "bled" a little on my pages, but that gave it more
of a "lived-in" look...or so I convinced myself.


Using curved needles and linen thread (supplied by Carrie) it's
kind of like a big sewing project. The paper inserts are called
"signatures" and you cut them apart at the end. This project
has five signatures which when cut, equal 80 pages.


Of course every book needs to have a back cover so I used the
back of my coffee bag for that purpose. I like that my book
still smells like coffee almost a week later. The binding is
a little looser than I would like but it's not going to fall
apart anytime soon and will act as a nice journal. Not too bad
for my first attempt. I ended up buying a nice 200 page book
from Carrie at the Craft Show this past weekend that I think
I'll use to "blog" in while I'm traveling in a couple of
months. I probably won't be able to find Internet access often,
so I'll write down what we see and do so that it will be easy
to transfer all of this to the keyboard once I get to a
computer. Even with modern technology, it's still nice to
have, and in this case, make a good book.