Gilt lettering and more Discworld stamp yearbooks

It's only been a week and already the school holidays seem a distant memory.  Thanks to a rotten bug, I didn't get as much relaxing crafting done as I wanted but I did manage to play with something I bought years ago.

One of the things I always wished I could do with the books that I create was to make good looking, crisp, gold lettering.  Metallic pens just don't do the job in my experience- they don't shine the way that metal does and the majority of pens just don't go fine enough (the finest one I have is a 0.3mm tip).  But years ago I came across Hugh Spark's webpage which talked about using a product that lets you print with a laser printer, gilt those letters and then transfer that to anything you like as a decal.  The stuff used I bought from Pulsar Pro FX (website was working a few weeks ago but now seems to be down?).

I followed Hugh Spark's instructions and for the most part, it worked well.  There most definitely a learning curve, and there are a lot of steps where things can go wrong.  But after battling the gremlins, I managed to make these...

These were all created as presents for friends.  As you can see, not all had the same spine contents thanks to the decal not always surviving intact to the end of the process!  But it worked well enough and enough survived that I was pleased with what I produced, particularly compared to previous methods.

And after doing all that, I had to get around to making my own.  The observant among you will notice that I have cheated with years and am not making these in year order at this point.  I do plan to fill in those gaps, but I also wanted to have somewhere to put the stamps that I am only lightly collecting again...  *wimper*  I can stop any time I want to... 

Discworld stamp Yearbooks

One of the last things I did on my break before pulling out the work I needed to do was to finish my most recent Discworld Stamp Yearbook.  It seemed particularly appropriate as this year is the 10 year anniversary of Discworld stamps.

These were inspired by stamp Yearbooks I have seen for Australian stamps.  Now since I don't collect them, I've only seen them for sale in the Post Office, but from what I saw, I loved the idea of information about what was featured in the stamp in addition to the stamp details and, of course, a place to put the stamps themselves!

For some stamps, I had fun researching the techniques that were used

Two of these were made several years ago, but I just finished the 2007 Discworld Stamp Yearbook and put my stamps in.  So now I want to show off my collection.

I love pages that have all the sports!

For others, I have wishful thinking gaps.

I only have one years worth of stamps to have my collection stored in as after 2008 I dropped collecting due to lack of time.  While I have bought the odd edition if it was particularly cool looking (one of these days I'm going to decoupage some of them for instance), I didn't have time to keep up as I always wanted to get the sports in addition to the commons.  Now I think about it though, I could start again with a reduced 'just the commons' policy....  *twitches*

If you would like to make a Discworld Stamp Yearbook of your own, feel free!  I've linked to the files below.  Read through my series on Bookbinding (starts here) to see how to print these out and bind them into a hard cover book.

Links (Word files)

Year 1 (2004-2005)

Year 2 (2006)

Year 3 (2007)

More info on stamps

The Cunning Artificer shop (where to buy them from)

The Discworld Stamp Catalogue (if you want to identify an unknown Discworld stamp)

Magazine Folio holder

This post is a re-write of an article I wrote many years ago for the Discworld stamp journal, The Stanley Howler Stamp Journal.  The purpose of the article and this post is to create a non-damaging folio cover for magazines so they can be neat and sorted, while still just as easy to read, plus can be removed without difficulty if needed.

 

All of the sizes and measurements given here are for A5 magazines (booklets made when an A4 piece of paper is folded in half and stapled in the middle).  If you are dealing with magazines of a different size, you will need to work out your own sizes.  A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the cover is a few millimetres larger than the cover of your magazines to allow for movement and to protect the contents.

Materials

• Thick card (posterboard or similar) NOT corrugated card for the spine in particular as it will not have the necessary compressive strength.  Two larger pieces for the cover (15.1cm by 21.8 cm) and one narrow piece (21.8 cm by the width of your spine- for an 8 journal cover 2.5 cm is good, for a 10 journal cover, I am using a 3 cm width piece)

• A sharp knife (plus bandaids/ first aid kit/ blood bank depending on how clumsy you are!
• A steel ruler
• Cutting mat
• Thick card or chipboard (for best effect the card should be difficult to fold- about the thickness of a hard cover book’s cover.).
• PVA glue
• Pretty paper (It is possible to get creative here if you like- fabric can be used if first stuck onto a plain piece of paper and there is practically an unlimited number of different colours and designs of paper available)
• String or thin cord (this must be STRONG- if you can easily break it with your hands it is too weak)
• Lots of clean, scrap paper and newspaper
• Large flat weights (I use old textbooks)

Method

Take your two large pieces of card and the paper you will use for the cover (green in my case).  Apply an thin, even coat of glue to one side of your card and glue to the paper.

To prevent wrinkles, immediately place this, paper side down, onto a pile of your newspaper with a clean piece of scrap paper in between (so newsprint doesn't get onto your cover).  Then place a heavy book ontop. This draws the moisture of the glue out of the cover paper and the weight stops wrinkles having a chance to form.

Wait until dry, then turn over and glue the sides over.  One neat way to do this is to trim the corners on a 45 degree angle to the card corner, at least one centimetre away from the card.  Fold this over to the card and glue down.  Repeat on all corners.

Then fold and glue each side down.  Leave to dry.

In the meantime, you can also do the same thing with the spine piece, or if you choose to add mock headband affects (see step 7), then you could skip this or just colour/paint the ends.

I just coloured the ends in on my spine as I will be covering it later

Take the spine and use the back of a knife or the steel ruler to place even 'notches' in the ends of the card where the string will go.  This ensures the string stays in place.

Tape one end of the string to the back of the spine and wrap the string TIGHTLY around the spine to create the necessary number of loops for your journal.  

Tape the other end in place, then use craft glue or hot glue along the entire back to secure the string.  

Back of spine after wrapping thread, before adding glue

Front of spine.  Each length of thread will hold one magazine

Optional:  Inbetween the string on the ends, take some contrasting coloured embroidery floss or similar and glue lengths in between.  This gives the appearance of headbands of a book (see Part 3 of my Book binding series to find out what these are in more detail)
Over this, glue a piece of paper, cut to a little narrower and shorter than the spine.  This helps to secure the string and also provides a good surface to glue the book together with later.  Leave to dry.
Take another piece of paper to make the exterior spine.  This paper should be fairly thick and sturdy as it will be under the most long term stress.  The paper should be taller by at least 5 cm and the width of your spine plus 1.5 cm to allow the paper to fold, plus 2-3 cm on each side for the spine paper to be glued to the covered.  In practical terms for me, that meant a piece of paper 28 cm tall by 15 cm wide.

Carefully place the spine card onto the spine and ensure it is centred.  Mark this position, then glue the back of the spine card (the bit with the paper covering the strings) to this spine paper. Let dry.

Now you can glue the covers to the spine paper.  You want to leave room for the paper to fold or your holder will not be able to close.  Try to have a even gap of 0.75-1cm on each side.  One easy way is to use a bit of scrap card cut to size that you can use to align the cover in the correct place.

Here you can see the brown bit of scrap card I used to position the cover in the right place and straight.  You can also see that I have glued green thread between the gold string on the spine prior to gluing it to the spine paper to get a headband effect and to hide the card

Glue both covers into place and let dry.

Optional- if you are using thinner paper or you think it will get a lot of wear, you may wish to add a bit of extra reinforcing paper on the top and bottom parts.  If so, do so now.

Use a pair of scissors or a sharp knife with ruler to cut the spine paper at a slight angle.  You want this cut to be to the corner of each spine card so the paper can be folded over and glued (see the picture below).

Make the cuts at a slight angle.  Note the extra paper I've glued in first to reinforce the ends of the spines

Once the sides are glued in place, use a ruler and a knife to cut the little left over piece off, top and bottom.

Use a ruler and a sharp knife to cut off this extra piece of paper flush with the edge of the book holder

Final step is to cut some endpapers inside to neaten things up.  Either measure up some paper a few millimetres smaller than the journal holder or use one or two pieces of A4 paper.  If you can find a piece of paper long enough great, but otherwise cut both pieces to a length so that one is long enough for one cover to the edge of the other and the other the size of the other cover.  It's your choice if you would like the edge of the paper showing on the back or the front or back, but I do suggest you glue the longer piece of paper (the bit that will cover the spine) down first, then the smaller piece of paper.  Let everything dry.

Before use, lay it flat on a table, outside facing up and run your thumb down the fold lines for the covers.  This helps neatens everything up and ensures the folds look right.

To use, open each magazine in the middle and insert it under a string.  That's it!  If you have any extra bits and bobs, a page protector with with the folder holes trimmed off works well either on an extra string or inserted in or around another magazine.

Finished books- showing off the details

Here are my Discworld stamp yearbooks.  I was only going to make the one Year 2 but thanks to the printing error, the purple edition is bounding using perfect binding and the green one using a sewn binding, both of which have starred as the models in my tutorial on how to make a hard cover book.

There are a few things I would do differently (don't worry if you're following the turorial- I went back to edit the odd detail I wished I'd changed!)  I love the texture of the green version, it's the same as my Year 1 volume but since I can't get that paper anymore I have to be thankful that my indecisiveness when buying the original paper meant I had the paper in green (I also have it in blue and black so I'm good for at least 2 more years worth of volumes!)  I also wish I'd left a bit less space between the spine and cover (I used a bigger gap than listed in the tutorial).

All they need now are the stamps!

Two different styles of headband.  Purple pre-stitched on fabric, the green using a more traditional method

I love marbled endpapers.  My own attempts at marbling have not had the same great colour intensity so these are hand marbled papers I bought a few years ago

Hand written spines.  I would love to have a more professional look but it requires rather specialised equipment unfortunately

Binding books- Part 5: Putting it all together

Welcome to the end of this series telling you how to make a hardcover book.  We are on the home stretch now- by the end of this tutorial you should have a finished book in your hand.

So what you need today is:

• Your finished textblock, decorated with headbands and a bookmark if you choose (see part 2 and 3)
• Your finished cover (see part 4)
• Some newspaper and scrap paper (to absorb glue moisture and to protect your textblock
• Glue (I use acid free PVA)
• Two pieces of nice paper the same size as you printed your book on for the endpapers (A4 in my case)
• Some baking paper or some plastic- this is to form a waterproof barrier to prevent moisture passing into your textblock when gluing the cover on, causing your paper to wrinkle
• Heavy books for weighing things down

The first step is to protect your textblock from glue moisture wrinkling your pages.  What I do is use a piece of baking paper that sits between the last page of the text block and the fabric you backed your text block with.  It will also prevent the paper from sticking to the cover.

Baking paper between the layer you wish to glue and the layer you wish to protect (your text block) will prevent moisture from wrinkling pages.

Your book is to sit with the back of the textblock aligned with the edge of the coverboard.  Place glue where the fabric from the text block sits.  (A variation in binding you could do if you have a spare blank page at the start and end of the book would be to glue the entire page including fabric down.  If you were doing this you would want to place the baking paper between the last and second last page).

Glue on the inside back cover where the fabric of the text block will sit

 Place the text block down, ensuring the baking paper is in place and place weights on the text block.  Leave to dry.

Text block glued down- note the back of the text block is aligned with the edge of the back cover.

Once it is dry, you have a choice- you can glue the spine to the back of the text block or leave it.  If you have headbands on and choose to not glue the spine, you might like to glue a strip of paper to neaten things up a little (have the paper a bit shorter than the spine so it covers the scrap material and the spine but not the coloured threads).  If you choose to glue the spine to the text block, put a thin coat of glue on the spine of the cover at the same time as when you glue the front of the cover down.

The front cover is glued the same way as the back.  Place glue where the fabric will go and close the cover so it makes contact with the text block.  Again, the back of the text block should align with the edge of the cover board.  If gluing the spine, press down along the spine to ensure contact is made.  Place weights on your book and allow everything to dry.

The front cover is glued the same way as the back- this is what the inside of your cover should look like once the fabric is glued down.

 If you used a sewn binding, glue the textblock bands down separately over the fabric.

Once the fabric is glued down, glue your bands down on top of the fabric.

You're nearly done!  All that you have left is to do is to add some endpapers to the inside covers to hide that fabric and make it pretty.  Take your endpaper and fold it in half.  Put glue on the inside of the cover and glue the endpaper in place (it's a good idea to put newspaper ontop of this paper to absorb that moisture).  Place a weight onto your book and leave to dry.

Open up your book and turn to the page where you see the textblock and the endpaper.  You'll probably see a bit of the fabric binding and cover at the seamline.  To hide this, place a thin line of glue on the first page of the book (the textblock's first page).  This should be only 5mm wide or so.  Once the length of the page has the glue carefully close the book, ensuring that the endpaper folds and sits straight with the text of the book.  Put some scrap paper in between the first and second page of the book to absorb any excess moisture.  Again put weights on the book and leave to dry.

Bit hard to see, but this is the page glued, ready to close to stick the endpaper (purple) onto the edge of the textblock (white)

Do the same thing to glue the endpaper in to the other end of the book.  And... you're done!  You've just made your book.  If you choose, you might want to add something on the cover or spine- below is the Discworld Stamp Yearbook I made a few years ago for the first year of Discworld stamps.  For this book I printed out a label for the front and used a gold pen to label the spine.  I plan on doing the same for the volume I've just made once the glue dries.

Here's one I prepared earlier..

That's all there is to it.  I'll post pictures of the other books when the book dries.  And please let me know if you use these instructions!  I'd love to see your results and it would be nice to know if this was helpful for you.  Leave a comment or drop me an email.

Binding books- Part 4b: Making the cover

Welcome to part 4b- preparing the covers.  If you have not already read it, you should really read part 4a where I talk about how to prepare the materials you need for the cover.  And if you're new to the blog then you might want to go further back to see the earlier steps in making your own book.

First step of making the cover is to ensure your spine material will be the right size.  Whether you are using paper for your spine or paper backed fabric, you want to make sure that your spine material is the thickness of your spine and about 5cm on each side (so if your spine was 1cm thick, you would want the material to be about 11cm wide).  The height doesn't matter at this point, as long as it is at least 5cm more than the height of your book- we'll trim it later.  Make sure the two long sides of your spine material are parallel and straight.

Have a nice flat, clean working area.  I also like to have some large, flat heavy weights to weight things down while drying as I work.  My university biology and biochemistry textbooks are ideal due to their size and weight but most science textbooks should be fine.  Failing that, large boards or boxes are good (novels tend to be a bit small- the weight does not end up being distributed evenly plus large piles often fall over when provoked).


Place your spine material right side down onto your working area (so black fabric side down for me).  Cover your cardboard spine with a even coat of glue and stick it in the centre of your spine material, ensuring it is nice parallel to the long edges.  Put a weight on it and allow it to dry.

My spine glued to the spine material.  When I measured this it turned out it wasn't entirely even so I trimmed the left and right sides after taking the photo to neaten things up.

At this point you have a choice.  Option 1: you cover the cover boards with your decorative paper first, then you glue the covered board to the spine.  This relies on you having a nice even edge of your spine material.  Option 2:  You glue the cover boards to the spine material first, then add the decorative paper afterwards.  Which you choose is largely a matter of aesthetics.  I prefer to have the fabric material on the inside when using a fabric spine, but that is only because the fabric could fray over time if not 100% glued down.  If your spine is paper then it doesn't matter either way.  Just do what you think will look best.  If you are going to cover your cover boards first, then skip ahead to see a few tips about covering them then come back here when you're done.  On this book I'm going to glue the boards to the spine material, then add the decorative paper.

When you glue your covers down, you don't want the cover to be right next to the spine- if so you'll never be able to shut your book!  What you need to do, its leave a good gap between the spine and the cover so the paper or fabric has room to bend around (remember, it's going to have to bend 90 degrees).  I leave a gap of 0.8 cm from the spine of the book to the cover.  And to ensure the gap is nice and even, I use a few scrap bits of card cut the width that I like.  If you don't want to do this, just use a ruler to ensure that your book cover is not wonky relative to the spine.  Cover the spine material with glue (but NOT the area where the spine spacer goes) and place the cover in place.  Ensure the cover is in line with the spine and that you've left a 1cm gap between the edge of the cover and the spine.  Place weights onto the covers and leave to dry.

Both covers glued down.  The right side still has the book spine spacer (a bit of card cut to size) still in place.
PS- sorry for the bad quality.  Inside photos in winter are fun...

Once it's dry, fold the top and bottom edges of the spine material over and glue down.  Use something blunt but hard to press the paper or material down next to the cover and spine.  Put weights on and let dry.

Top right you can see my 'bone' folder that I used to press the spine material down into the gap.  Alternatively you could use a ruler instead or something blunt with a hard edge.

 Next step is to put the cover on.  At this point you'll find it handy to have some newspaper around or a lot of scrap paper.  The reason for this is that paper loves to wrinkle when it gets wet, particularly when you are gluing large areas at once.  If you are not careful, it means your cover will wrinkle and leave nasty creases in your book cover.  When gluing your covers, as soon as you have glued down the paper, place newspaper on top along with a large, heavy weight (you may also want to put a clean piece of paper between your cover and the newspaper to prevent newsprint smudging).  The newspaper works great at drawing the moisture away from your book cover.

So to put your cover paper on, carefully cover your cover board with glue (thin even coat, not lots and lots that will ooze and make the paper soggy).  Because you want the paper to be stuck to the very edge, I also paint just the hard edge (the bit that will be nearest the spine).  Place the cover paper down onto the cover board, making sure the edge closest to the spine will be straight.  Place down on paper with weights to dry.

Painting the edge of the cover paper with glue will ensure there will be no unglued bit along the edge

Do the same thing for the other side.  Be careful that you have your cover paper the same distance from the spine as the first side or your book will look off balance.

One side of the cover paper glued down, the other being allowed to dry.  Note the book cover is face down on newspaper (and a clean piece of paper to prevent the newspaper smudging my cover) with heavy books on top (I knew that Biochemistry book would come in useful some day!)

When it is dry you can trim the cover paper if necessary.  It should be 3-4 cm from the edge of the cover paper on each side although the exact distance doesn't matter too much as it will be folded over and hidden later on in the process.

A quick note to those who wanted to cover their cover boards before attaching them to the spine material.  In this case, what you first need to do is glue your cover board to the middle of your cover material.  Follow the instructions above for tips on how to prevent your paper from wrinkling while gluing.  Trim the paper to about 3-4 cm excess on each side then fold and glue down the edges as described below.

The next step is to fold the paper over to make everything neat.  Step one is to sort out the corners.  Trim your paper on a 45 degree angle to the corner, so that at the tip of the cover board there is at least 3 times the thickness of the cover board.

Now fold over the paper on the 45 degree angle and glue down.  Use a bone folder or a ruler to press down the paper along the cover board to ensure it is completely stuck down.

Do this on every corner and let the glue dry.  You can now fold up the edges and glue them down.  Don't worry about the little bit of brown cover board because it will be hidden by the endpapers later.

Once all the sides are stuck down place the whole thing under weights again (ideally on some newspaper in case of any remaining moisture) and allow to dry overnight.

Those who covered their cover boards before adding the spine should now jump back up and follow the instructions to add the cover boards to the spine material.  The only thing you have to be particularly cautious of is ensuring the spine material is well glued along the edge so it won't lift over time.  However, be careful with your glue- too much and it will seep out and mark your cover.

That's your cover sorted.  Hope you have kept up so far.  Next tutorial will describe how to add your text block to the cover you just made to finish your book.

Outside of cover

Inside of cover

Binding books- Part 4a: Preparing the cover materials

Welcome to part 4a of my series on how to make a book.  This part talks about making the covers of your book but was such a long post and needs a lot of glue and wait steps so I decided to make it a two partpost.  Part A is really about preparing your materials and the types of binding.  Part B will be more about what do once you have all your materials prepped and ready to go.  Depending on your ambitions this may be as simple as 'get any old paper, cut boards to size' or could involve gluing fabric to paper or sourcing just the right paper.

Hard covered books are usually covered in one of three different materials.  The most traditional method is using leather, but leather expensive and requires some special techniques and tools that I know little about so I won't be talking about how to use it in this blog (well not unless I suddenly find a great deal of money and preferably a course to learn all the techniques at!).  Other materials are fabric, which is much cheaper and easier to handle than leather although still a medium on the 'pain in the arse' scale in my book, and paper, which is the cheapest and easiest!

Now if you look at hard cover books, there are traditionally three different types of binding: full, half and quarter.  In full binding, the whole book, front and back, is covered by a single piece of material.  The biggest catch in using this method on a small hobby basis is finding a piece of material a suitable size- it needs to be long enough to cover both covers and the spine and have room to be neatly folded over and stuck down.  If binding a A5 book (made from folded A4 pages) this means your cover material must be at least 5cm longer (and wider) than a piece of A4 paper.  Particularly if you have your heart set on leather, that gets expensive fast!

An alternative to full binding is half and quarter binding.  With these methods, traditionally the spine is covered in leather (for the strength, support and appearance), while the bulk of the covers are covered with something else- either paper or fabric.  In half bound books the corners are also covered with leather to give them a little extra support from knocks, wear and tear.

In this tutorial, I'm going to talk about making a quarter (or half) bound book.  I'm using a paper backed fabric for my spine, and coloured paper for the covers.  The advantage of this is that the fabric should be a bit more durable than paper, while the paper I use for the covers doesn't need to be large.  This meant I could get silly crafty with some plain A4 paper and a cardmaking mother's stash of cool supplies.

First your covers.  I use mounting board from my local art supply store.  The card is about 2 mm thick and should be difficult to bend.  Books have also been made using wooden boards and even molded paper mache boards but if this is your first attempt at book binding, I suggest sticking with something simple.  I don't recommend using corrugated card for something like this.  While it tends to be strong in one direction, it bends very easily along the lines of the corrugations which means that it won't take long for your book to start picking up creases.

If you place your text block onto the cover with the text block spine flush with the left edge of the cover, it should stick out about 3mm on the top and bottom of the cover and 3mm on the right.  For my A5 text block, I cut my covers to be 21.5 cm by 15.2 cm.  The spine of the book should be the same size as the cover and should be cut to be the width of the text block plus your two covers.  My spine is 1.2mm (which is actually a mm or two too small than these instructions but should be close enough to be fine).  I chose to keep it thicker because I know I'll be sticking quite a few things into the book when it's done which will expand it out a little.

Important safety tips cutting thick card.  Use a good quality, sharp knife.  The best way to cut yourself is to use a blunt knife- it can skip and slip when cutting, right into your finger.  Use a metal ruler (never plastic or wood) and use lots of thin cuts rather than trying to cut through the card in one pass.  And know where the band-aids are. Getting blood on your work is really annoying and messy.

Now for the spine material.  This material should be the width of your card spine above plus at least 5 cm on each side.  You can use paper if you wish, but on this book I'm going to use fabric backed with paper.  One benefit is that you can print onto the paper to make a labelled spine, although it does mean you have to be very careful in part B when you glue your spine card to the spine paper lest you have wonky writing.

To use fabric, the first step is to back your fabric with some paper.  Cut out a piece of paper the size of the fabric that you are going to back (and precut your fabric as well to save a bit of time).  On a clean, flat surface, place your paper down and then evenly coat it with glue.  I use pva glue thinned down a little with water and painted on with a thick paintbrush (but not too much water or the paper will wrinkle). You also don't want the glue to be too thick or watery because it will bleed through the fabric and leave a mark- pva when dry is permanent.  I have heard that using a flour based glue can be better for task but I've not tried it myself.

When your paper is ready, gently place your fabric on top and smooth down with your hands (making sure you don't have glue on your fingers and you don't press too hard so the glue will bleed through).  When flat and smooth, leave to dry and you then can trim the fabric paper to make the edges neat.

Fabric glued to paper- left is trimmed to make edges even.  White marks are due to *%& glue seeping through

So at this point you should have:

• Two cover boards cut to size (and should be the same size and a bit bigger than your text block)
• A spine cut from the same material as the cover boards.  This should be the same height as your cover boards and the same thickness as your text block
• Your spine material (paper or fabric backed paper) prepared and cut to size
• Your cover paper or material ready (as long as each is large enough to easily cover your cover boards the size is fine at this point- we'll trim it later as we work)

Stay tuned for the next post where I show you how to put all this together.  Now I have to go and see if my glue is dry yet for photos...