Make Someone Happy - Make them a Book!

I made my first sale in my new Luulla.com shop -

This London themed sketchbook.

One of a pair of stab-stitch sketchbooks, with leather and button fastenings.

The back and cover linings are in strawberry red art paper.  The front cover is a 100%  cotton, hand-lined bookcloth, with red bookcloth edge trim.  It is bound with black linen thread.

This is now on its way to California, USA!

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Aaaaand... I also made this, with two pieces of paper that were left over from the Sketchbook I made for Mariann, when I went to Cascada Studio in Spain: 

A case-bound pocket journal (A6 size). 

The covers are in handmade mulberry paper, with a leaf decoration (I think this was done by laying on leaves dipped in some kind of bleaching medium, or by dyeing the paper with the leaves laid over it). 

The spine is made from a piece of deep grey suede (as I used for Mariann's book), which I lined by hand. 

With a case binding, the whole cover ("case") is assembled, from the front and back panels, with the spine in between, then the pages ("book block") is placed inside the case and the covers closed on top.  The book block is glued into the inside of the covers, then cover linings and/or end papers are added.

I used a sheet of hot pink kozo mulberry paper for each endpaper - front

and back - this endpaper is folded back, so you can see the paper of the book block.  Only the cover-side of the endpaper is glued down, so that you can open the other side. 

You'll have seen this in lots of hardback books - even the machine-made ones you find in the shops tend to have this kind of endpaper structure.  There are other ways to do it, but this is my preferred way - I think it's neater and gives the book extra strength (as there's a double layer of paper glued inside the covers - the outer pages of the book block, then the endpaper). 

There's a dark charcoal coloured ribbon bookmark...

...a tiny, hand-wrapped hot pink silk tassel decoration...

and a hand-made lino-cut initial, printed onto kozo paper, with deep burgundy ink and mounted on a square of deep grey suede, to match the covers.  I love to make personalised labels for my books - I think it really makes a book special, if it's been personalised just for you!

Just the thing for scribblings, notes, thoughts, favourite poems, recipes, even writing a novel (well, maybe a novella!).  I hope the recipient of this will love it as much as I loved making it!