Sunday, March 4, 2012

First!

This post is somewhat of an update on my previous post.  I finally sat down and bound my little favorites art journal.  I used waxed linen thread and worked from this tutorial:  Tortagialla's Coptic tutorial.  Nice tutorial, very clear, good pictures.  I realized on my 9th of 12 gatherings, though, that I was doing my kettle stitches in the wrong direction.  So I switched for the rest and they looked a bit better.  I did have trouble with thread tension, but hey, it's not like I'm selling it or giving it to anybody else.  It's mine.  It's not consistent and it's not pretty, but it's done, and it's mine.



Not terrible for a first attempt working only from a website and not a real live teacher.  I think next time I try a coptic binding I'm going to use un-waxed thread.  The wax kind of made the thread stick to itself and everything else, which aggravated my thread tension issues.  Opening it between each gathering and wiggling it a little helped settle out the stitches along the spine, so I'm hoping that with some use, the thread will settle out more evenly.  We shall see!

3 comments:

Maryanne said...

Yipee!! You got it finished! I read somewhere the other day that we can't expect our inital efforts at a new technique to be perfect. It takes time and practise to become really proficient at something. Great job!

K J D said...

It looks great to me!

I love the idea of a journal that will open flat.... and have been wondering for ages how difficult/expensive it would be to make one. Yours has inspired me!

Thank you for the link..... I'll have a look tomorrow :)

Karen

Parabolic Muse said...

Are you kidding? You learned this virtually? This looks great. And I love the cover.

Thanks for visiting me. I've seen you around the Street Team and you do good things. I'll be back to see how your next journal comes out!