The Bookbinding Workshop

Last Saturday was a super busy but fruitful day.

In the morning we had a bookbinding workshop for the visual communication juniors and I was one of the seniors teaching the accordion bind.

Bookbinding is a very tedious but therapeutic process and I think everyone should try to make and bind your own book at least once in a life time.. the level of satisfaction you get upon seeing the book is just too awesome. It doesn't have to be perfect, the important thing is you made it!

There are 5 very useful and do-able types of bookbinding which we thought will benefit our juniors..

Voted as the favourite type of binding by all the seniors, but this is tedious. 

Good for displaying things in series.

Simple and fast.

Looks professional and has the cooperate feel.

Also known as Japanese Bind.

Now you know the names, actually there are a lot of tutorials online teaching you how to do these, you just have to googles it.

It is highly advisable that you have all your materials ready before you bind a book. It's just like baking, you will hate it if you realise you do not have sugar after you finished mixing the butter and eggs. 

Thread for coptic and chinese bind, awl for creating the holes for sewing, bone folder for scoring and folding, white glue, ruler......

These are materials prepared for accordion bind, basically it's good to have all types of adhesives because different paper reacts differently to the adhesives. For hard cardboard it will be difficult to glue using the glue stick. For soft paper, white glue is going to make it warp. And if you do not have steady hands, spray-mount is not so advisable. The best of all is still double sided tape.. but some times if you have large area to glue it's going to cost you a lot.

Materials prepared for the year 2s to hands on..

Chinese bind (Japanese bind)

Machine cut

Other materials that you can add on to your book to make it all special.. the good thing about all handmade is you can do whatever you like!

For grommet binding.

Samples Astrid brought for us.. all hand-bound.

Nico giving instructions.. very capable organizer for the workshop..

cool year 2s

Professor Astride sharing tips ;)

A very nicely designed and useful hand-out for the workshop.

The workshop was a huge success.. hope the year 2s brought back with them what they want to learn.. book-binding is indeed tedious and time consuming but there's so much fun doing it.. it's those kind of work whereby once you started you never want to stop until you complete it. Haha.

This was the accordion bind I did for my photo imaging.. it's a good way to display  and keep the photos.

I have always wanted to do coptic bind but never knew exactly how.. and today I finally got to see how it's done! I'm going to coptic bind something one day.. maybe this week.. but I still don't know what to bind. Haha.

Anyway this is a super clear step-by-step bookbinding tutorial I found online.. try it!

Have fun in bookbinding!