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Making Alt Books Pt 2: Fabric Books |
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Written by Sister Diane (CraftyPod)
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Some Interesting Bookbinding Techniques
I love making books out of wierd things. I love using small books as greeting cards, or gifts of information, or pieces of art, or very special, one-off zines. Here are a few simple bookbinding methods, and a ton of ideas for variations. So, Craft On!
The Fabric Book: Method 2
Fabric books have such a lovely, touchable quality, and they lend themselves to all kinds of embellishment techniques. You can use up your fabric scraps, or get some old linens or garments from the thrift store. The only thing to keep in mind is that woven fabrics work best for this project. Stretcy fabrics, not so much.
• Decide on the overall finished size of your book, and then imagine it opened, and lying flat. That’s the size of fabric pieces you’ll need to cut in order to make your book pages.
 
• A simple way to keep all your fabric pieces the same size is to make a cardboard template, and then trace it onto your fabric with a sharp pencil. Then, you can cut carefully along your pencil line. Or, if you’re blessed with a rotary cutter, use that.
• If you’re worried about your fabric fraying, you can do a couple things: you can cut the edges with pinking shears, or you can get a product called "Fray Check"
at your fabric store and apply it to the edges. I think a little fraying looks nice, though.
• Some fabrics look the same on both sides. This is great, because then you can use a single layer of fabric for each page of your book. If your fabric has a distinct wrong side, however, and you don’t want this to show, you can get a product called "fusible webbing" in the quilting section of your craft store. It’s like a double-stick tape for fabric that you activate by ironing. You can use it to fuse two pieces of fabric together, back-to-back, to create each page.
 
• When you’ve cut out all the pages you like, it’s time to bind them together. So, iron them all nice and flat, and then stack them up together. Then, fold the whole thing in half, and iron the crease down.
 
• When you open your book back up, that crease is where you’ll place your stitching to bind the book. Depending on how thick your book turned out, you may be able to stitch it on a sewing machine, or you may need to do it by hand, with a sharp needle and thimble. You can sew with matching thread, or embroidery floss (like in the picture above). And depending on the fabric, sometimes you can even staple it. (But test this on some scraps before you attack your book.)
Embellishing your Fabric Book
Here are just a few ideas:
• Embroidery -- by hand or machine.
• Fabric paints or puff paints.
• Sewing other bits of fabric -- or paper -- to the pages.
• Iron-on patches or appliques.
• Gems, sequins, and beads of all kinds -- sewn on or glued on.
• Iron-on transfer sheets that feed through your printer, so you can even make iron-ons from your artwork and photos.
A note on embellishment: if you’re fusing two pieces of fabric together, then you might want to do any sewing-related embellishments before you fuse, so that the messy backside of your stitching is hidden forever when it gets fused between the pages.
<--Go back to Part One: Accordian-Fold
Go on to Part Three: Perfect Bound--> |
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