Wednesday, May 23, 2012

how to do an all along stab sewn binding

First things first, glue the spine. It helps to put the paper between boards and apply pressure. Once that's dried (10-15 minutes later) mark the head and the tail, leaving more room for trimming on the tail so about 10 mm in from the head and maybe 15 from the tail. Split the difference between that, and mark the center of those two points, and again marking the middle between the center and the head/tail marks. Then you can use a dremel to drill those holes, and remove the boards used to glue and drill. After that it's easy. Cut a length of thread 3x the height of the book and begin sewing by going down through the middle hole. If you have an even number of holes, you can just pick one to be the middle. Go up through the next hole to the right, and back down, etc, until you reach the end. The same looping stitch is carried back to the left with the exception that you skip the middle hole. On the return from the left you will thread back through the center from below, making sure that your needle and thread end up on the other side of the previous thread, so that you can knot the two over the thread from when you skipped the middle.(This is show in  the bottom right square of the photograph). After you have knotted the two threads simply pull the needle and thread back through to the bottom and, if you're lucky, the knot will pull in with it and become invisible. Either way, you can trim off the ends and get ready to case in your all-along stab sewn book. 

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