Wednesday, March 16, 2011

A tapes bound book in the works!

This is a follow up post for Rob who asked a question from my last tapes bound post.



This photo below shows a tiny book that was recently purchased from my shop. The tape I used was actually a strip of linen bookcloth that I cut down to the size I wanted. I sewed the tapes onto the spine while I was sewing the book. If you're interested in how to do this, it's very similar to the cord bound sewing which can be found on a past post by clicking here. You would just replace the cords with tapes. For such a small book, I don't bother with a sewing frame, I just place the tape onto the spine and sew over it as the book is in my hands. Since this book is so small, I can get away with using a 1/4" wide piece of tape and just having one tape to hold the text block to the cover. On larger books, I use wider tape or more of them to give the text block more support with the covers.


To connect the tapes to the cover, I place the tapes on the inside of the cover like this photo shows below and I glue it there.


This particular little book was done differently than a traditional tapes. The tapes on this book were brought across the cover and glued. I then tooled around the leather to create the stripe on the front of the book as shown in the last photo. Since I wanted the stripe to stand out on the cover, I used two pieces of the linen bookcloth tape to build it up. Typically, I would just use one tape, but I wanted it to stand out. One tape was glued down and the other right on top of it across the cover as shown below. So, it looks as though only one tape was used.


This book was one that was made a few years ago but it's the same book that I make and sell in my shop. You can see more photos of this book here.


3 comments:

Rob Ross said...

Awesome, thanks Karleigh Jae!

Anonymous said...

LOVE this book! What type of leather did you use? Is it as thick as it looks, or is that a product of the size of the book? -Jay

Karleigh Jae said...

Jay, I use lambskin for most of my books. The lambskin I use is actually fairly thin and I don't need to pair it down at all. The leather I use comes at about .08-1.2 oz thick.