Breathing for a bit....

So I have massive amounts of custom orders and I took a break today (sorry to my customers!)

I made one custom order and then I made the book for the BEST Book Swap. I belong to a group of bookbinders, we're located all over the world, we make all sorts of different books and we all sell on Etsy.

BEST (Bookbinding Etsy Street Team) has a book swap that we do every few months. We each make a book and send it to another participant of the swap. I'm excited to see the book on it's way to me from Turkey. I still need to show off the book I received from the last book swap too so maybe I'll do that soon :)

I loved making this book and being a bit creative with it :)

I don't have the dimensions because I forgot to measure the book before it went out. Here are some lovely photos though. (A lot of photos because I think Daniel liked this one.)

Top View Open. This book has an accordion spine with sewn pages.

It's such a fun book structure. It sort of looks like a stack of old envelopes.

The inside endpapers and the pages are all archival tea stained pages.

View of the accordion spine with dark brown linen thread.
Lokta paper was used for the spine.

Here's the book all nice and closed. The buttons were pulled off of an old shirt and I knotted the linen thread to make the tie around cord.

This is the back. Old stamps from everywhere. This was my son's favorite thing about the book and he was disappointed that he couldn't play with it.

You can see the book all nice and closed here. The cord wraps around the buttons, one on front and one on back. 

The Front Cover. This envelope was sent to me when I purchased a bunch of old stamps from someone. The envelope is from 1929 and I love it. My favorite things are the way it's addressed "Special Delivery" as well as the fact that someone wrote measurements on the left side of it. (Who doesn't use envelopes for random jottings?) And I also love that someone wrote in red ink "Very old, 1929" right on it. Who did that?! Haha!

This is the back with all it's stamp loveliness.