Tried my hand at leather binding today. Nothing grand.Literally used leftover scraps of paper from w

Tried my hand at leather binding today. Nothing grand.

Literally used leftover scraps of paper from when I cut down my letter size to A5 and relatively cheap leather from Michaels. The snakeskin was under $15–way, waaaay cheaper than the goatskin I bought from Talas. Because there is no way I’m practicing on premium leather.

The process took two days, mainly because 1) I was filming for YouTube, and setting up the camera + making sure I wasn’t accidentally playing music or a video in the background took too many braincells; 2) I actually had to wait for the glue to dry completely before jumping into the next step of the process, and 3) most importantly, I was winging it the whole time. I had no instructions to follow, so I was swapping out needles, reinserting cords into different sides of the boards (outside in, dummy), and wondering if I should case the leather (I did) or pare it (I didn’t).

The video is 1/3 of the way edited, but I’m definitely going to need 2-3 business weeks before I dig into my goatskin.

Good news though–my leatherworking tools came so…maybe I won’t actually wait that long.