4 February 2007
3-Hole Pamphlet
Posted by Lady Artisan under: KSProject .
Well, the results weren’t very satisfactory. On the upside I did get two
pamphlets done. On the downside, the finished pieces were disappointing. At least I’ve figured out what won’t work and why.
The pamphlets:
3-Hole Pamphlet–
This was the first one I completed. The cover is made from a 50/50 blend of Premo! and Bake and Bend clay, but thinner than I usually use for my faux leather. I antiqued it with gold acrylic and buffed it before putting it together. The sewing itself was easy enough, of course. I used metallic thread in copper and gold, twisted together by hand. The paper is this wonderful indigo “crocodile skin” with a slightly raised texture on one side. I love this paper in the book because it makes the most wonderful rustly sound when you handle it, but I’m really not sure how I’m going to utilize it to show it off the best. Maybe I’ll use it as a practice book for calligraphy. More photos:
Now for the problems. The 50/50 blend works well if all you’re doing is rolling or bending the clay (notice that I said “bending,” not “folding”). You obviously can’t make a very sharp fold in it so the spine on the pamphlets are very rounded. I’ve done a couple of small, faux leather notebooks that were rolled like scrolls with the paper in the center and had no problems with the strength of the clay.
Any weak spot in the clay, however, undermines its strength and that’s where the problem lies for the pamphlets. Once I drilled holes into the center of my covers (I do this using a small pin vise drill), I made weak spots in the cured clay. Simply bending the cover causes splitting at the weak spots. The splits aren’t huge yet and don’t interfere with using the book at this point but, over time, they will cause problems.
You can see in these pictures that it won’t take long, with regular use, for these splits to end up running much of the length of the spine. So the 50/50 blend didn’t work at all. I did consider using eyelets in the sewing holes to see if they would fix that weakness but they’ll really only help to keep the thread from splitting the clay. The holes would still be in the clay (even if there’s also an eyelet in there) so bending the cover back and forth will still cause integrity problem at those weak spots.
I did finish the 5-hole pamphlet as well, but I’ll have to post about it later.
