I had a delightful visit from Tien Chiu and her boyfriend Mike yesterday. Tien came to weaving relatively recently, but has already mastered a formidable body of knowledge about the craft, and is now weaving and constructing her own silk wedding gown. You may have heard about Tien in her role as one of the co-founders of Weavolution. I've read about her studies and her travels on her very entertaining blog, but meeting her in person was a special pleasure. What fun to spend a few hours chatting about structure and going through each others samples. Social networking online is great, but meeting your virtual friends in person is even better.
The mailperson brought a partial shipment of some bookbinding tools I had ordered, and I was able to punch the holes in pages I had prepared earlier, and complete this book:
The idea here was to leave rough, exposed edges on this wraparound binding. The binding itself is two layers of cloth with handwoven patches. The pages were sewn to the cover in a technique called long stitch. I was a bit wobbly about that part, and the exposed stitches are quite uneven, but I did get a functional book. Here's what the outside of the spine looks like:
The pages are recycled school notebook paper. They open flat.
I learned a lot about what not to do on my next book. This is the same way I learned to weave!