I thought I’d give another update on what I’ve been working on! It’s the end of the school term and I may or may not be procrastinating some stats homework.  You’ve seen before the miniature book key-chains that I made in a previous blog post… well I’m still making miniatures, but this time they are lapel pins! I posted previously as well on making paste papers and attempting to stamp them with UG — that was intended for this project, however, it wasn’t turning out how I wanted so I scrapped the paste paper and worked with marbled paper.

This time instead of doing an adhesive binding for the textblock I used a French link stitch to sew the signatures together. I wanted to ensure they would be more secure!

These were sewn last summer and after that, I took a lengthy break as I started my PhD and life got busy! Finally, I sat down to get them finished. First came the covers:

Once the covers were put together I put the lapel pin in and cased in the textblock by gluing down the end papers. I used a super glue to glue the pins in, simply because PVA wasn’t doing the trick and I didn’t want to wait forever for paste to dry. With super glue I know the metal backs are on there tightly (my fingers were also stuck tightly together)!

After casing in the textblocks and putting down the end papers they are clamped to dry and then they were finished!

I’ve made a total of seven little lapel pins now, all with beautiful hand-marbled paper (none of it my own, I get scraps from my teacher Dan).  These lapel pins have all gone off to their new home and they were well received (and blogged about here: http://michaelridley.ca/2018/03/fetish/)!

School is nearly done for the term, and then I have one class to take over summer but there is a lot I’m looking forward to! I hope to be taking several bookbinding classes this summer, starting with an album course in April. I will also be making a trip out to NYC in June and will hopefully hit up some of the bookstores down there. Of course, I’m excited for my summer class as well and getting through the course work portion of my PhD!

I do have a few blog posts planned and hopefully I can keep up a post at least once a month!

*fingers crossed*