For my students' 8th grade graduation, I bound a book for each of them and Q turned a pen for each of them and we made a set for me as well. I, of course, was a little distracted when they were finished and didn't take pictures before giving them away. I wanted to document them though so here's my book.
I knew I wanted to use elastic to keep it closed but Q came up with the ingenious solution. I cut a small slit at either side of the binding, about a quarter of the way down, and used my loop turner to pull a piece of elastic through. (The elastic was cut slightly smaller than the book's circumference.) I lapped the ends and hand-stitched them together then tugged the elastic until the seam was hidden in the binding. The biggest trick was making sure there wasn't a twist in the loop before I sewed it.
Most of the book was blank pages (8 sheets of printer paper folded in half per signature) but the last half of the last signature had a picture of the class followed by a short story, "Call Me Chicken" by Joseph Tauer. Getting those formatted so the half sheets printed on the right part of each page to provide the correct order when they were folded in half was quite challenging for my spatial skills.
Here are the other four paper patterns. I made two of each color for a total of ten books.
Q found the "Vertex" pen kit and we chose it because it was a fountain pen, had a weighty feel to it, looked cool, and has a magnetic cap. He turned the kids' pens out of black walnut scraps that we already had but he made mine out of curly leaf mahogany, since I thought it was pretty in the store. :)
He also added a neat little stripe detail at each end of mine.
Madly talented, isn't he?
The students really seemed to like the books and they didn't even fight over who got what color, so it was a complete success.
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