Independent Art and Photography - Making the book part 2...

After my folded pages had been sitting under a pile of heavy books overnight to flatten them out, the inside of my book was ready to go.

Next, I needed to make the cover. At the same time as making the prints for the pages, I printed my title on the cover sheet too. I decided to go for grey card, as I feel this reflects the tones in the images the best. I didn't want to have a colourful cover for a book of deliberately quite flat images.

I then had to bore holes through all of the pages and the cover in order to stitch it together. This included going back through the cover holes the opposite way to make sure that they had a clean look and didn't appear torn on the outside.

I chose some quite thick thread to stitch the book together, as I wanted it to be obvious that it was handmade - I wanted to highlight the very thing that was holding the pages together. It was just a case of doing five simple stitches and tying the ends of the thread together on the outside of the cover to hold the pages in place.


I then decided to make a slip cover, both to protect the final book and also to keep the pages from flapping around when they are not being looked at. I made a template in paper, then cut, folded and glued the same card that I had used for the book's cover in place. I wanted to keep it consistent with the look of the whole book.

The only thing left for me to do after that was creating a title for the slip cover and cutting a small semi-circle out of it to allow for easy access to the book.

And there we have the finished product!