Spent the day at the NUCA drawing workshop with Sarah making books. I just could not get my head around how you sew the signatures together. A number of helpful diagrams have swum before my eyes recently. I cut the signatures at home and I was all ready to go. Once Sarah had shown me what to do I was away, more or less. I made one A4 sketchbook with a pretty wildly bright blue wipe clean cover, an orange ribbon and some flower wrapping paper from Paperchase as end papers. It looks pretty good. Whilst that was drying I sewed 15 signatures of varied paper together to make a random A5 book. I glued on the scrim when I got home.

The idea was to make a couple of demonstrations of hand made learning journals for the summer school; the ultimately customised learning journal. What would it be like of the whole book was randomly papered with graph paper, cartridge and dotted paper and so on? Difficult to make an A4 book like that though I could have a go at a pretty random book with the varied papers we have lying around at school. Would that affect what you did in the book? Would this affect how you feel about the book?

I tried not to be too precious about it all. I can see that one could get carried away with it and then never want to actually make a mark in the beautifully crafted object. My two today were pretty rough really. Look OK from a distance and once they are full of collage and cuttings and photos they should look good. The random one I want to draw in straight away and I haven’t put the boards on yet.

How about making a book in leaves and then binding it together later? Sarah suggested a Japanese side stitch technique.

We also discussed gold leafing a plate. I have some not real gold leaf from Great Art but I realise that I don’t have much clue on how to use it. I want to make a gold leaf plate.