The Story Continues - Traditional Book Binding

So, picking up where the last story left off, about the home-ec teacher and her son, today I was working away on my kanji studies when the pair walks up again. This time, in Japanese, they ask if I would like to work with her son in the creation of a "book". Having nothing more exciting to do, I happily joined them up in one of the classrooms. What we were creating was a real hardcover book from scratch. It was myself, the home-ec teacher, her son, and the school nurse.

Building these books included a number of steps. We cut a ream of paper to size, then punched pin holes through it and wove fine thread through the holes as binding. We then took construction paper and mounted it onto the front and back, then sealed the binding with special paper and adhesive.

Next, to work on the exterior, we took thick fiberboard and cut it slightly larger than the book interior: two exterior slices and a spine piece. We then took colored cloth and used spray adhesive to adhere it to Japanese paper. We used an iron to evaporate the adhesive through the cloth, making it stiff and perfectly flat. From there, we put a textured paper along the exterior spine, and proceeded to adhere the interior book to the exterior hardcover. We even put those little cloth ribbons that appear along the spine of a professionally bound book (check one and you'll probably see what I'm talking about). They ended up turning out really good. Mine looks a little messy cause I put a little too much adhesive on my exterior cloth binding, so it has a dark spot, but other than that, it's pretty cool.

It took the whole day, and was a lot of fun. We also went out to lunch at a great soba shop. The whole day was Japanese too! I learned to do the book binding using Japanese and gestures. I even taught a few English words to them. When I get internet, I'll post a pic of the book, along with all the other pictures I've been saving up to post on here.