L-O-N-G Book

I finished this book yesterday, that's been on the drawing board for a month or two.  I'd covered the boards a while back with perhaps my all-time favorite dye-painted linen/rayon fabric, printed five years ago (when I had enough space to handle a couple yards at a time).  I got a lot of mileage out of this cloth.  What better way to immortalize what was left than to cover a book.

The book is 6.5 x 11.5 inches.  The 22 inch max folio length necessitated some major sewing, which I did with variegated black & white thread.  It has a sewn tapes long stitch binding.  The tapes are out of the same fabric -- see the white-edged tabs glued to the covers in the photo above -- fused double and quilted.

My idea for the book was largely to use up dark-patterned glossy scrapbook cardstock that was included in a pad of same I bought several months ago.  I'm not keen on the glossiness or the fact that it doesn't fold well because the coating flakes off.  For me the best use of that stuff has been to color copy it onto plain cardstock.

Anyhow, I gathered all of that paper, added a number of black & white collages I did over the last few years, some non-glossy dark-patterned paper and a couple of black printed commercial transparencies, and voila!  Click any of the photos to enlarge all.

I'm at that place of realizing that the book itself, like this one, IS the art.  It doesn't have to be used as a journal at all.  And this one likely won't be -- although it's always possible, regardless of how dark the pages are, what with white gel pens, light colored paper stickers, add-ons and fold-outs, etc.

A note about the sewn tapes binding, which was the first binding I learned, via Mary Ann Moss's Full Tilt Boogie online class.  It requires more pre-planning than other binding methods because 1) the signatures are exposed on the spine (as they are with Coptic and other exposed-spine stitches), and 2) the outside folios of each signature need to be glued to each other (unless it's a very small book) to hold the book block together.  If you're using two-sided patterned paper, you need to decide which sides will be glued together and which will show.  If you're using one-sided paper and you want to glue the white sides together, then you've got to line the spine edges of the outer folios with something else, unless you're happy leaving the spine white...which I'm usually not.