Books and Bindings

Looking for something to do tomorrow? Come to see us in the One Craft Gallery, Shepton Mallet - we're open for the Shepton Mallet Sunday Market!

Open for the Sunday Market! We’re excited to be open for the market this Sunday! Very much hoping the weather will be kind for us and all the people who have put in so much effort to make Shepton Mallet’s Sunday M…

I’ve spent many enjoyable hours this month working on a laced on binding for my City &Guilds diploma with . I’m covering a copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Most nerve wracking was the edge painting, but I’m quite pleased with the results. Many hours still to go, and hopefully the final result will be worth sharing, and submitting!

It's Shepton Mallet's Snowdrop Festival this week, so drop in to see us at One Craft Gallery! I'm there on Thursday, so do pop in and say hello. This is our beautiful window, courtesy of Pen and Jen!

Snowdrop Window Shepton is all things snowdrop this week, so we’ve even more snowdrop-themed goodies in the One Craft Gallery! Don’t forget to look at our window and take a few more steps inside while …

Absolutely lovely to have my regular little bookbinding group back for a session making half bound books with a ribbon closure. Lots of chatter and laughs and yet everyone still produced beautiful books!

For this month’s meetup of we decided to depart from the AreYouBookEnough theme. February sees the annual Snowdrop Festival in Shepton Mallet, celebrating the renowned horticulturalist James Allen, who was the first person to breed new varieties from wild snowdrops. My contribution was a concertina pocket book, with 6 photos of Shepton with a swathe of snowdrops running along the bottom pockets. Tucked into each pocket is a different
variety of snowdrop. On the back is some information about each photo. I learnt a lot as I did it - the history of Shepton prison is fascinating!

Oops! Can’t believe I didn’t post December’s challenge till now. It’s even the wrong year! Blame a hectic (tho lovely) Christmas. Anyway, as my contribution for Lapis Lazuli, I wrote a poem, tho hardly worthy if the description, but the title ‘Why feel blue when you can feel Lapis Lazuli’ stuck with me once I’d thought of it. Each line is placed on an appropriately toned blue sheet and folded into a Hungarian map fold, then glued together waterlily style. It’s even written in Lapis Lazuli ink… I just wish my writing was neater!

Just getting things together and remembering why I don’t often do craft fairs! However, tomorrow I will be at the Christmas Craft Market in Wells Town Hall. It runs from 9 - 3.00, so if you’re in Wells, do pop in and say hello. As well as selling a range of books, I’m selling vouchers for my bookbinding workshops. I love to give activities as presents, so I’m hoping others feel the same! I will also have a sale tray for anyone who likes a bargain!! 😁📚

Spent such an enjoyable day yesterday, showing 3 of my lovely regular workshop ladies how to make my take on a star book. They were so creative with their ideas, and their books turned out beautifully. The only person not to finish was me! So, I’ve added pictures of my ‘through the windows’ book at the end.

A busy weekend taking 3 workshops! A lovely couple from Sweden through Airbnb Experiences who made wraparound leather notebooks, two of my regulars who came for a festive special to make pocket concertina advent calendars and a fellow .sheptonmallet gallery member who wanted to make a photo album! All did brilliantly, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I feel I need a holiday - good thing I’m going to stay with my daughter in York tomorrow!

Results of another lovely day in the Daffodil Barn learning the basics of edge decoration with Kate Holland as part of my City & Guilds Diploma with . Looking forward to practising more at home!

Ran a workshop for 4 lovely ladies who were staying in Bath to celebrate a significant birthday. It’s the first time I’ve taken a workshop to someone else’s’ house, and it worked really well! All their books turned out really well, and much fun was had! All booked through Airbnb Experiences.

Very pleased to have completed the Laced on Leather Binding course with Shepherds Bookbinders in the Daffodil Barn. I thought I wasn’t going to manage it as floods meant I couldn’t get there on day one! However, many thanks to tutor Angela Sutton who prepped my text block and made my endpapers, I was able to catch up over the other 3 days. And for people who think 4 days is a long time to make just one book, I’ve compiled a photo showing just some of the many stages involved! Fabulous course as always!

Only just uploading my Tie book before the end of the month! I struggled with an idea for this one, but when I researched the different types of tie there are, inspiration struck! The pages are sewn into the spine to mimic the look of a shirt front. The ties inside are cut out of paper scraps from my bookbinding projects. The wording isn’t exactly a poem (I still, probably wrongly, feel poems should rhyme!), but they do have a sort of rhythm. I’m enjoying experimenting more with the wordy elements of my books! And apologies for early reference to the ‘C-word’. If only the theme had been in December!!

Why do I always leave it so late?! Here are my favourite 9 from the challenge! Such variety as always!

My latest Coptic stitch mixed paper journals ready to take to .sheptonmallet - great fun to use!

What a lovely creative Saturday! Making leather journals with beautiful inlays with my regular group of bookbinders. The sections were sewn together with a butterfly or long stitch, linked with chain stitch. They were all so different, but all beautiful! Well done all of you! 😁

Some fabulous responses to the challenge. Here are my favourite 9!

Another lovely couple came to make wraparound leather notebooks through . A lovely Sunday morning workshop with great results, and the creative chaos that comes along with it! Though you should have seen the room after the previous workshop! 🤣

Fabulous morning spent with my friends in sharing our responses to this month’s theme: Chess.
My idea was to create a snake book out of a chess board. I wanted some wording and came up with something that would make sense being read both in the folded up book and on the opened out chess board:
Opposing colours face each other across the board.
Attack,
Fear,
A Bad Bishop, Backward Pawn, Blunder, or worse
Zugzwang,
You lose because you have to move.
As Check inevitably turns to Checkmate.
This is the book version - you might just be able to read the words on the chess board, which come out in a slightly different order.
This added an extra dimension to the usual challenges of measuring and cutting! These required particular accuracy, so it was a great relief when the finished folded version ended up a pretty neat cube. So I tied it up with a ribbon and treated it to a box!!

Just in time to post my Ubuntu book for the challenge for July - .
I’m sure like most people, I had to look up the meaning, and was fascinated that as well as being an African word meaning “humanity to others”, it is also the name of a computer operating system! Such a juxtaposition, this gave me the idea of contrasting the values which make us human with some of the concerns about our technological age - in particular, artificial intelligence.
A flag book seemed the perfect format with colourful human values, patterns and flowers contrasting with black and white type and the 1s and 0s comprising bytes - the basic unit of computer processing.
It generated a very interesting discussion in our monthly artists book group, which would probably never have taken place if not for the Ubuntu theme!

Not an easy job selecting my 9 for last month’s challenge

Before and after! All set for 2 people new to bookbinding who booked on an Airbnb experience with me yesterday, and after today’s session making Bradel bindings with 4 regulars. Pictures of those to follow as photos so much better than mine! Both really enjoyable sessions, such lovely people, and everyone did so well! But I did need a glass of wine before tidying up today! 🤣

Three lovely days in the Daffodil Barn last week, learning how to make a drop back box and brass post folder. Many thanks to Jonathan Powell of and for excellent instruction. Another step on my Level 3 journey!

A fabulous couple of days in the Daffodil Barn last week with learning how to do inlays, inlays and using foil to decorate some sample boards. Can’t wait to use on a book cover!