



It's funny, lately I have actually been doing a fair amount of crafting, but have been almost wholly remiss in actually posting about said crafting here. On my craft blog. Right. I think that at this point we can all sort of agree that my blog has undergone at least a handful of transformations over the course of the nearly six years (!) of it's existence.

Sewing blog to craft blog to small business blog to parenting blog. I should make a colorful flow chart. I think maybe now this space has simply become the internet extension of my brain. It is whatever I want it to be on any given day, and I feel pretty grateful that people seem to be patient enough with me to continue reading along. Even on the days where I just talk about my cat or how much I like acorns. Oh man, and those painfully nerdy and too frequent posts about woodpeckers. You all are seriously good to me.

Anyway, I digress. What I mean to say is this: yes, the making stuff part of this here blog has been a bit absent. But not because I haven't been making stuff. I have. And these little books are among the things that I've been making, and I'm going to tell you how to make them too.

Miniature Center-Stitched Books

What you will need:

paper for inside pages

cardstock or cover weight paper for cover

bookbinding thread (or upholstery weight sewing thread or something else that's strong)

bookbinding needle or other strong, slightly blunt needle (embroidery needles could work)

bone folder, craft stick or other folding tool

What you will do:

Cut a stack of regular paper for the inside pages of the book, and a piece of cover weight paper for the cover. The cover piece should be slightly bigger than the pieces for the pages. Here I used pieces of paper that are 3 inches by 4 1/4 inches for the pages. The cover piece is 3 1/4 inches by 4 1/2 inches.

Using your folding tool, fold the cover in half by carefully matching up the corners of the cover stock and making a sharp crease at the fold. Do the same for each of the pieces of paper going inside the book.

Stack the folded pages inside one another, and then fit them inside the cover. Using your folding tool again, press on the pages at the fold to really push them into a tight stack with the creases of each page tightly fitted to the one behind, and the whole stack tightly fitted into the cover.

Even if you really smash the creases into one another, you may find that your stack of pages no longer has an even edge. If this is true, and it bothers you, take the stack of pages out of the cover, and while still folded into one another, trim them with a papercutting knife, a sharp pair of scissors, an x-acto. That sort of thing.

Clip your stack together in a couple of places so that it will hold together, and use some kind of sharp object to poke holes all the way through the stack. A bookbinding awl is great, but you can also use a nail, a needle- whatever you've got. Since this is a relatively thin book, something small and sharp should work fine. The spacing of the holes is up to you, but you'll want an even number and they should be done in pairs. For this book, I did four sets of holes, with 1/4 inch space between the holes in each pair. Each pair of holes is spaced 1/2 inch apart, with the first hole on each end being 1/4 inch from the edge.







Thread your needle and tie a knot in one end of the thread. Starting on the outside cover and pushing your needle through to the inside, pull the thread through the first hole at one end of the book. We'll think of this as the bottom from now on. Go back out through the neighboring hole, and then repeat the process in the next hole up, going from the outside of the book in, and then out the next hole on the inside.









Keep stitching until you have reached the top of the book, and it looks like the above picture.









Repeat the same process, this time going from the top of the book back down, making stitches in between the ones that are already there so that the outside of the book looks like the picture above (the inside will look like this too).

Tie the two ends of your thread into a tight knot to secure your stitching and trim the ends.

I used a bit of bookcloth tape to cover the outside of the book and hide my stitching, but it's really just an extra step and isn't necessary. If you do want to cover your spine and don't have bookcloth or bookcloth tape, you could probably get away with a bit of lightweight fusible interfacing and a strip of fabric, provided you are very careful with the iron! Okay, yes, I've done it before...





I also used a handheld corner rounding tool to round the corners of my pages and cover. Again, definitely optional, but also pretty easy to do if you feel as though it's a detail that you like.

And that's pretty much it! Not nearly as complicated as it seems, and really a pretty quick project. And guess what else?

We can add this book to our list of things to put in tiny envelopes. It fits perfectly.







The template for the envelope is here:

Envelope template