Silver Case

There will be only one Sammy Davis Jr notebook. I took a heart-cut out of the middle of the album cover, but I think the graphic comes out really nice. I’m getting the internals tighter and straighter and neater too. I enjoy the endpapers in this one, too.

Front Cover

Back Cover

Endpapers

Folio (One of five different pictures)

My Lawrence Welk notebook prototype was a good prototype but a bad result. I tried some enormously crude techniques to trim some of the edges. Basically I ended up hacking Lawrence Welk to death with an x-acto knife.

But I learned.

And I worked on notebook two, “The Supremes: Right On.” This Donna Summers-free album is, apparently, well-regarded. It certainly has nice cover art.

I used A5 paper (half an a4 size) as my folios. The notebook is roughly 4″x6″.

The notebook is 5 signatures (sub-books) of 6 folios (a single sheet of paper folded in half and stitced in). Each folio is 4 writing-sides… thus it’s a 120-page notebook. I stiched the signatures with some “satin” dental floss and a hand needle.

One reason this worked better than my first time, is tha tI used 3m contact aerosol adhesive. Trying to lay and smooth glurpy rubber cement or other glues just looks like this. The 3M adhesive gives a strong, instant, tidy bond.

Another reason this worked better is that I measured better and realized from my Lawrence Welk experiment that the cover length is substantially longer than just 2 x signature width. There is a lot of slop lost in the spine.

I embedded some surprises in the signatures too. Every signature has a folio with a special edition semi-translucent picture of the Supremes!

Overall the project turned out pretty well. The endpapers are reasonable. The signatures are reasonably aligned. The spine is reasonably smooth. Looking forward to even tidier notebooks with more suprises coming up.

I made my first attempt at binding a notebook tonight. I selected some a4 blue paper I looted and used the cover of ‘Lawrence Welk and His Champagne Music’ album cover.

I followed the well-written directions, but of course, after doing it once, I understand the process much better for next time. Thus notebook #2 should come out better.

The book is drying now. I will see the results tomorrow.

For round two, I want to everything nicer and use some strange/vintage paper as the stock. And to find nice paper for the end papers. (normally people used marbled paper). Using rubber cement ought to work better than Ikea’s clone of Elmer’s glue, too.