book arts

What else can you make out of book board and paper? Why not some trays? They’re pretty much just the bottoms of boxes and then every item in your house can have a receptacle.

The green one is a tray to hold hand lotion on the nightstand and the red one is to hold my wallet and keys. For the red one, I copied the dimensions and doubled base from the large valet tray on the Parvum Opus website, which made figuring out the measurements really easy.

The double-thick base is a nice touch and makes the tray feel pleasingly hefty, even if it eats up the book board. It’s about time to order more (and replace that red marble paper that I finally used up).

All of this paper shopping and book binding and box making has thrown me back to when I put wax seals on letters and used fountain pens every day. Working in the stationery store, I accumulated a lot of fountain pens with my employee discount. Why, I wondered, did I have a thousand dollars in fountain pens (in 2006 money; I looked up Mont Blanc’s current prices this morning and fainted) just sitting around in a desk drawer?

Clearly, they needed a special box.

I figured out the size by putting the pens and cartridges on a piece of paper and eyeballing how much room around them I’d need, then used that base to get all the other measurements. This ended up about 10 inches x 4 inches and 1.5 inches high; maybe a little big but now I can put MORE pens in there. (Just kidding, I can’t afford pens now.)

I’m pretty pleased with how I’m figuring out what pieces need to line up. This is my best “box meets spine” alignment yet!

I stumbled on website and Instagram of Parvum Opus, a one-woman studio making desk trays and boxes (yes, cool)…and also OBELISKS and PLINTHS and ARCHITECTURAL MODELS (yes! cool!).

Obviously, I need to try making on obelisk. I’d better order more book board.

When I was ordering book board and supplies from Hollanders last month, I saw that they had ready-made text blocks, aka all the pages sewn together and ready to put in a cover.

I added a few to the cart to practice casing in (getting the pages into the cover) and this is the first try with their chonky text block:

Hollanders also had pre-made endbands, or the little woven colored strip that you see at the top and bottom of the spine. (Historically they were hand sewn and helped keep the pages together, but they’re just decorative now in commercial binding. I am not to the level of learning to sew endbands yet.)

Making the cover is no big deal at this point, but casing in is still a little tricky: You have to get everything lined up on both sides while the glue is wet and there’s really no shifting once the covers hit the endpapers. This one didn’t quite get centered top to bottom, but I DID get the spine set well enough to give it the flex it needs to open nicely:

For my third book ever, I’m not mad at it (even if those endbands look a little chewed). Every mistake is progress!

Last week I branched out into custom box sizes, using the formulas in my book to figure out how to make a box big enough to hold post-it notes. Did it work? Yes! Did I use the same formula/notes to make the red box and then the green box, but they ended up having slightly different overhang dimensions? Also yes!

But practice makes perfect, and I’m still practicing.

Fair warning now: If I know you, there’s a non-zero chance that your gift this year is going to come in a homemade box. (The green box is actually going to hold carwash tokens for my friend’s traditional Christmas gift; I used paper from his store for it.)

I finished another project from the Constructing and Covering Boxes book. The book outlines every step you need to do and gives you all the measurements, so all you have to do is follow the instructions… and we know how I feel about that.

You even start with rectangles!

And you end up with something pretty impressive!

It’s interesting to compare this new hobby to sewing–there was a learning curve on the different papers, just like figuring out which fabric is best for which project. (This Florentine jewelry print is much thinner than the Japanese paper I used before so it wasn’t as forgiving when being glued). There’s figuring out how much material you need–I went through a whole half yard of bookcloth (I thought I’d use half of that). And much like pressing during sewing, you can really improve how things look by just rubbing them with a bone folder.

You can also see how box making evolved straight out of bookbinding: this is the base and lid for the box, but it could also be a hard cover for a (giant) book:

Look at how those pieces all fit together! Exactly like Legos–or even a quilt–but a lot faster.

I followed the instructions in my Constructing and Covering Boxes book and lo, I have constructed and covered a box:

Is it perfect? No–I messed up the measurements somehow so the fore edge of the lid is a lot longer in front, and there may be some glue spots here and there. But do I love it? Oh yes. Fancy little boxes are deeply satisfying to Past Me, who used a fountain pen in eighth grade, who worked at a stationery store for six years, who still thinks about “the writing desk facing the windows of azaleas” scene in Rebecca. 

In fact, the hand-marbled Italian paper I used for this first box was from my time at the stationery store (which ended in 2006, so…).  Finally I have a reason for moving it from apartment to apartment to house for years!

I finished my first casebound book on my own last week! The raw materials were just a $12 kit from the art store but it made a really nice finished object. Look at how book-like it is!

After I finished the kit, I immediately ordered a bunch of bookboard and a better glue brush and various printed text blocks from Hollanders. That makes this an Official Hobby, so I’d better start using a lot more notebooks. (I also got that book about making covered boxes, so I guess I can always turn the bookboard into desk sets.)