New Sewing Frame

This past week, Daniel made a sewing frame for me. I've been doing all my cord bound books without a sewing frame. (I can just hear all the gasping from all you book artists!) It was a pain but doable and worked ok. The sewing frame is so much nicer to work with though and results in straighter cords.

I found the instructions for how to make a sewing frame while reading a book from the library by Josep Cambras. It's titled The Complete Book of Bookbinding. I found it's a great book for any bookbinder's library. You can read my book review below the photos of the sewing frame and the book I sewed on it this morning.




Book Review: The Complete Book of Bookbinding by Josep Cambras

I wouldn't say that it's the "complete" book because really, it skims the surface of several different techniques and processes of bookbinding. It can give a beginning/intermediate bookbinder an idea of the bookbinding world and the tools used in it. It provides a brief history of bookbinding which really was brief but still worth the read and the beautiful photographs of old books. It shows the tools of the trade and goes through the process of binding a book, gold tooling the cover, doing raised spines, making boxes and even shows a few artistic books at the back. It really skims the surface on several things but gives you a start with enough know-how so that you can continue your search on bookbinding elsewhere. It gives instructions for making a sewing frame from home, but it failed to give us directions on how to set the cords up and actually use the sewing frame. (We found the instructions elsewhere online for this and we used nails instead of expensive sewing keys which worked quite well.)

Overall, this book would be great for someone who is interested in the bookbinding world or for those who would like instructions on how to make a sewing frame.

Books For Lovers!

Daniel and I made these books today. The covers were designed by Daniel.

This love bird photo album can hold eighty 4" x 6" photos.




This book was made for you to write love notes in. Just leave on the pillow of your love to let them know that it's their time to read and write in it.


I've been busy with other new books which I'll post about soon :)

~Karleigh Jae

A Really Big Book

I love really big books. Last night I finished a 9" x 12" book and it's now listed in my shop for purchase :)


I already have pages cut for another 9 x 12. This week I've been making longstitch books. My shop ran really low on them because of the Holiday Shopping Season. Next week I will be making Cord Bound Books and I'll show more progress on Lori's 9 x 12 Cord Bound Books and show you the process of it. :)

My husband Daniel takes the photos of the books in my shop; that's his hand in the photo.

Raised Design in Leather - Second Part

Click here to see Part One

How to make a raised design on a leather cover

I've realized that I speak the typical "tutorial dialect" when being filmed. I'm sorry for this :) It really is a difficult thing to just be myself when a camera is going. I guess it might be from still being teased about being a silly kid on home videos from eons ago :) Anyway...hopefully, I can get past my fear of the camera and liven it up a bit.

Here's the new video on doing a raised design on a leather book cover. Part two will be published tomorrow.


Part Two may be seen here

There are several ways to do your design underneath. This is usually how I do them because I really like to let the design go wherever it's going to go and I've found this is the best way for me. I know other book artists who would shun me though because they do it differently :) Really, you can use anything underneath as long as it can be glued in place. Some book artists use bookboard or even layers of leather. Some glue the leather to paper and cut out the design before placing it on the board. I suppose that way may be ideal in some ways, however, having done it, I find it tedious and limiting in some ways when I create my design. That's why I do it the way I do. I hope this gives you a start though and helps you to find a way that works best for you.

~Karleigh Jae

"Apple" Pie

This is my son Jadon holding up an "apple" pie that we made. It's actually zucchini instead of apples. My husband made a garden this last summer and treated sliced zucchini with sugar and lemon juice and cooked it with an apple pie filling recipe and then canned it. It's really yummy and you can't even tell that it's zucchini! I made the pie crust and let Jadon help roll it out. He really wanted to make sugar cookies with frosting and sprinkles (a little more work than pie) so I let him use a cookie cutter to make shapes in the pie crust before we placed it on top. He loved it and was happy with pie instead of cookies :)

Leather Cover for Coptic Stitch - Part 1

This video tutorial shows how to cover the boards for a coptic stitch book and shows how to do pleated corners.

There are other ways to do corners but I've found that I like the pleated look the most. In the video I use a .08 oz leather but I've also used a deerskin before that was between 2 and 2.5 oz and it worked great for that too. I don't even own a paring knife at the moment, so ignore all those books that say you need to pare the corners of the leather when putting it on your book because in part two, I'll show you how to do the inside of the cover to offset the thickness of the leather.

How to Iron Leather

Need to get wrinkles out of leather?

Here's a video tutorial on how I get the wrinkles out of lambskin. We use this same method for cowhide leather as well.





If you have any other tips for getting the wrinkles out of leather please leave them in the comments.

Cord Bound Books -Part One

Would you like to learn how to make cord bound books? Throughout the month I'll be posting tutorials on leather work in bookbinding as well as how to do the cord bound books. The first step in any book is designing the book and gathering materials. You can see the beginnings of that below :)

I'm currently making two cord bound books for a woman named Lori. She's getting married in the Turks and Caicos Islands and she's using that as a theme for the wedding. The video below shows the Leather that will be used for each book (Aqua leather on the memory book and Gold leather for the sign in book) and it shows the stamps that will be used in the design on the cover and throughout the book. In the next video, I'll show the maps that will be used as endpapers and on the inset on the covers.



The books will be a little bigger than 9 x 12 as the pages were torn down to be 9" x 12", my husband Daniel cut all that paper down for me :)

The sign in book has 100 pages and the larger book has 200 pages (or 400 sides)

HUGE BOOKS! In fact, the memory book will actually end up being about 6-7 inches thick as I still have to put spacers in the spine. Maybe Lori will opt for two (still large and thick) memory books instead of the massive one?