I like making these coptic stitch journals. Now that I finally "own" the stitch (after having to re-read the instruction for at least the first 12 books or so), they are easy to make and you can be really creative with the covers.
For this lighthouse journal, I used Davey board for the covers, so they are nice and rigid. I covered the boards with rusty brown mulberry paper for clean and pretty edges. Then I tore the image of the lighthouse from a piece of wallpaper sample and glued it to the front cover. I glued the piece of nautical map wallpaper to the back cover and tore out some pieces of wallpaper with smaller lighthouses for the end papers.
I used light tan mottled paper for the pages and blue mottled paper for the fly leaves. I also used some small strips of the blue to wrap around the folded edge of some of the signatures to form a pattern on the exposed spine.
I punched holes in everything for the stitching stations and bound it using a single-needle coptic stitch (chain stitch binding) with light blue waxed cotton thread, to pick up the blue in the sky of the image.
Pretty. And I'm sure I'll make more very similar ones. So there!
Ah! Back to the scenic wallpapers! Nice. They look so sturdy when you use Davey board. :)
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about this stitch is that they allow the book to lie flat so you can write or paint in them.
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