Colour & cloth for book binders and textile artists

2 days
3-4 November 2018
Sat-Sun

Colour mixing

Colour family

Hand-dyed book cloth

You need no prior knowledge of colour mixing or dyeing – everything is taught from scratch.   All the techniques you learn here can be done comfortably at home and require no specialised equipment – most can be achieved with a bucket and some gloves! The dyes we use are cheap and easy to obtain.

If there is time at the end I’ll also do a demonstration of printing digital images on to fabric using a home inkjet printer.

With a maximum of 5 students you’ll get lots of one to one support. This will be backed up with group demonstrations and detailed class notes.

The class will run from 10.00am to 4.00pm each day.

Maximum students: 5
Cost: £150

Books Galore!

4 days
4-7 March 2019
Mon-Thurs

Accordion books

Coptic binding

Japanese stab binding

Perfect binding

We’ll start from first principles so that whatever you make will have a high quality finish. We will cover at least:

• Understanding how to select suitable papers, boards and fabrics for making books and how to use simple book binding tools and techniques.
• Creating a wraparound, paper covered, notebook with torn edge pages.
• Folding an accurate accordion fold book and fitting easy end covers.
• Stitching a single signature, hardback book. This will be covered in book cloth created from hand-dyed/printed fabric.
• Stitching a multiple signature, open spine hardback book using the fascinating Coptic form of binding, again covered in hand-dyed/printed book cloth. We’ll use both the single needle and twin needle methods to give lovely patterns across the exposed spine.
• Stitching at least one variation of Japanese stab binding. This is another open spine binding with a variety of beautiful stitch patterns. The covers for this were traditionally made from paper but this variation uses hard back covers covered in fabric, with a hinge to allow easy opening.
• Learning the third method, perfect binding, will not only let you make books from cut sheets such as computer prints  but you’ll also have the basic skills to rebind/repair your favourite paperback books.

With a maximum of 5 students you’ll get lots of one to one support. This will be backed up with group demonstrations and detailed class notes.

The class will run from 10.00am to 4.00pm each day.

Maximum students: 5
Cost: £300

Words and Books

2 days
27-28 April
Sat-Sun

Images to follow

The first day offers an opportunity to experiment in creative writing in a non-threatening and structured way and covers descriptive writing, storytelling and poetry in a light hearted way. On the second day we’ll look at various ways of displaying and binding the words that you’ve written. The book forms we use will be in response to the text so will be selected from a wide range of possible folded, glued or stitched styles.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to this – it should be fun. Words and books? Oh yes!