Christmas is coming!

Yesterday I popped over to our local branch of Sue Ryder to pick up some bits for the Folksy Upcycle Christmas competition.

My entry will involve this lovely bit of sheet music, the Dover book of Victorian floral stencils, a complimentary Barclaycard road atlas from 1990 and 'Introduction to Printing Processes' (which is actually quite interesting and might be saved from the cutting knife!).

Find out how to enter yourself here.

With Christmas on our minds, we're really looking forward to having a stall at the Pick and Mix Maker's Fair in Holt on December 12th, which promises to be a lovely day out, especially as The Tea Lounge from Norwich are doing the food! Find out more about the fair here.

After a recent burst of activity we've got a little box full of tiny offcuts of leather and marbled paper, the perfect size for making teeny, tiny little books like this one -



It measures just 4.5cm - not much use for writing a novel, but the perfect size for small striped bears.

Handmade Books

Last Saturday we went on a brilliant course run by a local bookbinder, Judith Ellis. We learnt a technique called 'longstitch' binding, which doesn't require any glue.

In the morning we used pink and green PVC covers to get the hang of things -

But in the afternoon we were let loose on a selection of lovely leather covers, and marbled papers....
Jon used dark brown leather with a light blue marbled paper inside, and I used red leather with a matching red marbled paper.

We're really excited about experimenting with this technique - somehow printmaking, letterpress and bookbinding seem to be happy bedfellows. Hopefully we can remember enough from the course to make another one each this coming weekend...

There are lots more examples of this type of binding on Flickr.