6 Week Book Binding Course

Book Binding - 6 Week Course

Over 6 sessions we’ll become paper artists through playful exercises and crafting. You’ll start by creating three simple sketch book styles before building up to making your own bespoke journal. Melissa will be on hand to guide you while leaving plenty of scope for you to make a truly personalised creation. All levels of crafting experience encouraged!

Provisional dates:

6pm - 8pm on Tuesday 8th Sept, Tuesday 15th Sept, Tuesday 22nd Sept, Tuesday 29th Sept, 13th Oct, 27th Oct

Please note: We are currently just taking a waitlist to decide whether to run the course. The course cost would be £125 for the 6 weeks. This will include all your materials and tutoring. 

Week 1 - Paper Explorations

We’ll get to understand grain, weight and types of paper. Play with folding & cutting to make signatures and whole journals or sketchbooks, finishing up with our own single sheet zine.

Week 2 - Japanese Stab Bind

Discover a simple but visually impressive technique that is particularly well suited to making sketchbooks and photo albums.

Week 3 - Single Signature Soft Cover

We’ll learn to prepare a ‘signature’ or section, which we’ll then laminate and cover to make a simple but beautiful note book.

Week 4 - Your Bespoke Journal Step 1

We’ll start by folding, cutting and then stitching our signatures to make the body, or ‘book block’ of our journals.

Week 5 - Your Bespoke Journal Step 2

In this session we’ll begin to consider themes, colour and shape as we build the spine and end papers of our journal. Participants are welcome to bring their own decorative paper to this session if they have a particular style in mind. We will discuss this in the previous session.

Week 6 - Your Bespoke Journal Step 3

Dressing our journals! In this final session we’ll create the covers that will complete our totally unique, hand-made journals.

Course tutor bio: Melissa Davies

Melissa is a poet and book maker based in Cumbria, working across multiple disciplines always with a connection to landscape and the natural world. Her first book ‘The Arctic Diaries’ came out in 2023 and since then she has run creative projects, workshops and retreats that aim to give communities a deeper sense of connection with their own environment. Melissa works from the principle that everyone has theability to create.

www.melissadavies.co.uk

Instagram: @melissawrote