We haven’t printed much over the past week, but this isn’t because we haven’t been busy.
Instead, we took it upon ourselves to see if we could learn how to bind books. We mainly started doing letterpress because we love the world of books so much – the paper, the printed word, and the reality of it all. We knew that we eventually wanted to work our way up to printing books, and though we knew it would take a lot of work and practice, we’ve been too excited at the thought to get it out of our heads.
We considered taking a class, and there were loads of options near us in Holland, where we could learn everything from the basics to strange and unusual techniques. Since we’re a little short on money at the moment, however, we decided to first turn to the internet for advice.
It turns out (no surprise here) that there are loads of great tutorials on the internets, and they come in all shapes and sizes. If you want to learn it, someone out there has made a tutorial for it. We ultimately ended up using the extremely useful written tutorial over on Jamie Butler’s blog Ting-Tong, but also had fun watching YouTube videos like this one by alyiswriting:
I’ll go into more detail about exactly how we did everything sometime later, once we’ve perfected the art of bookmaking and have had a chance to take some decent, well-lit pictures. At the moment it takes both of us to do most of the steps, so there’s no one left to hold the camera, and the length of the drying process means we end up completing some of the steps late at night, when there’s no light to photograph by. In any case, after graduating from internet book binding school, we tried our hand at binding a couple of notebooks, and this was the result:
The finished product is drying now, and we’re super crazy excited about it. Look for the fruits of our labour up on our Etsy shop over the next few days!
To the Letterpress! 