Day 8: My New Bookbinding Crush

So it used to be that I only had crushes on my tools, like my water pen and my little birdy snips, but today I discovered another aspect of my one true love: Sewing on Double Cords.  I LOVE IT.  It is a really big shame that I probably can't describe the glory of it AT ALL but I will sort of try anyway I guess.  So the thing is, when you sew up a book, what you do first is punch a bunch of holes in the folds of all the signatures, and then the sewing part is when you run your needle and thread up and down the folds, going in and out of the signature through the holes.  Sort of make sense?  Ish?  Well, whatever.  So, when you are sewing on like tape supports, the deal is that when you come out of the signature through the hole, you pass the needle over the tape, and then go back in through the next hole, easy peasy.  When you sew on a single cord it's a bit different, because instead of just going over the cord into the next hole like you do with tape, instead, you come out a hole, wrap the thread completely around the cord, and then go back in through the SAME hole as you came out of.  So far so good-ish?  I'll pretend that this makes perfect sense and you are nodding your head vigorously.  Okay, so then along comes DOUBLE cord, which means that before where there was just one tape or one cord, there are now TWO cords, just hanging out being confusing.  So, what you do is you  come out the whole, basically wrap around the two cords like a PRETZEL, and then go back in from whence you came.  For some reason, it is SO FUN.  What's even BETTER is that we were doing it "packed," which is when you wrap around the cords extra so the cord is completely covered with thread with no spaces.  So it ends up that you come out of the hole, wrap around the cords pretzel style, and THEN wrap around them in a Figure 8!  You guys I do not know why I am geeking out about this so much  but for some reason I just LIKED it!  So, above is a picture of my packed double cord sewing, which probably you can't see very well but that's ok.  I'm sure I've captured the full amount of glory with my words; pictures would be redundant.

 Okay so this is a picture of the two other kinds of sewing supports we've started learning about but haven't done a whole model with so far. Both the braidy looking thing and the tape lookign thing are both this kind of leather that I can't remember the name of, oh wait no-- "Alum-Tawed" is what it is called.  Weirdest name ever, I have no idea what it is supposed to mean, but basically it is a thin strip of leatheryness. You treat it like it's double cord (woo!).  The tapey looking one is just a piece of the leather with a slit cut in it that you sew through, so it's supposed to end up more flat than if you were using cord.  The braidy one is similarly a slit piece of leather, but you twist the ends into the slit a few times so it gets all twisty and braidy looking. It ends up looking pretty much exactly like cords.  Alum Tawed is cool because it is like the most medieval of sewing supports--Renate says you see it used a lot on wooden board covered books from really olden times. It kind of makes you feel like a monk to mess around with it, which is always a nice feeling to have in moderation.

 This is what Bartlett looked like when I was sewing it up!  As you can see I sewed it on tapes, so it was super simple and easy. Well, simple and easy except that I was freaking out the whole time because I was working on AN ACTUAL BOOK instead of a scrap model like normal times!  It was pretty freaky but also really great once I finished!  Here's what it looks like right now:

I'm excited for when I get to take the finishing class so I can get it back in its pretty cover!