Everyone Loves a Sweet Binding

I made this sweet binding as a gift for a friend. She didnt really appreciate it, so that sorta sucked, but it was fun to make. I think the stitch is so beautiful that I used skinny satin ribbon to replicate it on the cover of the book.

After covering the binder's board with bookcloth and before I attached the cover, i used a ruler to mark 2 columns of holes down the binder's board. I think i placed them 1/2 inch apart horizontally and maybe 1/4 inch apart veritcally (I can't remember for sure). At first I just poked small holes with my awl, and then after I had marked them all, I used the awl to make holes all the way through the cover. I made the holes just big enough to fit a needle threaded with ribbon.

After poking all the holes, I trimmed the volcano things off the inside of the cover and burnished the board flat with my bone folder, just like you would for a coptic binding.

To sew the ribbon through the cover, I started from the inside at the bottom left hole, leaving a tail of ribbon inside the cover a couple inches long. I went directly across to the coordinating hole in the right hand column and then on the inside, up to the second hole from the bottom on the right side and back out to the front. On my way back over to the corresponding hole on the left side, I picked up the stitch that connected the two bottom holes, careful not to pull the tail of ribbon through the cover. I just repeated these steps until I got to the top, and tied the two ends of ribbon together on the inside of the cover. I could have debossed the cover, so when the endpapers were glued down, it would have been smooth, but I decided not to worry about it.

Sorry for the long explaination. I just thought I would write it all out in case anyone else wanted to give it a try. This was probably my favorite book I made this semester, and I'm sad i gave it away.