Two Soft Cover Journals with a Cross-Stitch Binding

 In my last post, in which I wrote about the crisscross aka secret Belgian book binding, my first photo included two soft-cover journals with exposed stitches on the spine that cross over each other to form overlapping X's. It occurred to me that a person might think that would be called a crisscross binding, too, so I mentioned simply that those are different, but didn't want to say more about them in a post about the other journals. So now I am going to tell you a little about those.

It's called a cross-stitch binding, though I've also seen it called by other names, including a "corset" binding. In order to get the stitches to cross on the outside, you have to double back some on the inside of the signatures, so the fancier the X-pattern on the spine, the more stepping back and doubling up on the stitches you need to do on the inside, which can get a little tricky and may make the middles of those signatures a little bulky. Find a good demonstration and examples of this on Margarete Miller's website here. I agree with her conclusion that, while it's an attractive binding and kind of enjoyable to figure out, it's not something I want to do very often, because it's pretty fussy and the enjoyment diminishes after you've done a few of them.

These two small journals are made with a flexible cover-weight paper that has attractive striations on one side. I made them with a wrap-around cover and pockets in the back with the idea that they would make nice travel journals. They're about 4–5" high and wide, with moderately heavy paper that will take light use of wet media. The pockets are made from some large security envelopes I saved because I liked the pattern on the inside, and the paper was fairly heavy and durable.

The back cover wraps around and tucks into the front cover, where I put a circle of decorative paper and a white label so you can give your journal a title — or at least to make it clear which side is the front! But, seriously, I label my travel journals with the year and some reference to the contents, such as "2021 Road Trips," so I wanted to facilitate labeling them like that.

Come to think of it, I should do a post about my travel journals sometime. They're kind of a cross between a journal, a sketchbook, and a scrapbook. I guess that would make them visual journals. Anyway, I'll show you some examples of those next time.

Thanks for reading. These two journals will be available at my site during LoLa, which is coming up very soon! September 18–19 (2021), from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I'll be in my front yard with the journals and some other things on a table out there, and more items in the front porch for socially distanced browsing inside and out. My site is number 23, which you'll find on the LoLa website here. Or click on "Artists Directory" and enter my name (Sharon) into the search bar at the top (blue background). 

Stop by and say hello if you're in town (Minneapolis, Minn., that is).

Crisscross binding and a not-so-secret Belgian book artist

Here are a few more of the handmade journals I'll have available during LoLa, Sep. 18–19. Last week I showed you my casebound journals, now here's a different type of binding.

One of my favorite forms of book binding for journals is the secret Belgian binding, or, more properly, the crisscross binding (shown above at left; the X-binding at right is a different matter). I learned this one a few years ago at Articulture, a local art education center. I like it because it offers the convenience and decorative stitching of a Coptic or chainstitch binding (here's an example of that)—that is, it will lay flat when open, making it user-friendly for left-handers as well as right-handers, and it has a decorative exposed stitch across the spine and on the covers. 

At the same time, unlike Coptic binding, it has a board covering the spine, which protects the pages and interior stitching, and gives you a place to write the date range or other information where you can easily see it when it's on the bookshelf. I find it to be a good choice when I want to repurpose an old book cover into a journal, especially if I want to use the spine from the original book—which I trim and then glue onto a strip of cardboard to make the new spine.

You make the cover and spine boards first, then stitch them together, which is kind of fun and reminds me of the sewing cards I played with as a kid. Then you sew the signatures to the ladder of crisscrossing threads on the inside of the spine. I made a slight adaptation of the way the signatures are sewn in because it felt a little more stable to me than the method I was taught. But this is not a technical blog, so I'm not going to go into that here. 

I was kind of attracted to the name, too: My sister was living in Belgium at the time, and my paternal grandparents had a fondness for the country because that was where Grandpa Parker served in WWI; after WWII, they signed up to send CARE packages to a Belgian family and maintained a lifelong correspondence. 

Inside the back cover of the "Microbes" journal

And who can resist the allure of something that's secret? I wondered about the name, though, and my teacher didn't know why it was called that, so I did a little research just now. It's not so secretive, after all, but its origin was a mystery to the American book artist who learned the technique in Europe and introduced it here.

The book arts underwent something of a revival in the late 20th century, and in the 1980s, a Belgian book binder named Anne Goy wanted to make a book with the decorative appearance of Japanese stab binding, but that would open flat, so she invented this technique, which she called crisscross binding. Later, American book artist Hedi Kyle learned it without knowing who invented it, only that it came from Belgium; hence, she called it the secret Belgian binding—because, to her, the origin was a secret! Sounds much more poetic than the IDK Belgian binding, doesn't it?

So, the secret isn't in the binding itself, but the seeming mystery of its origins. It's so easy to find these things out via the Internet nowadays, but when Hedi Kyle in the 1990s wanted to know about this mysterious new bookbinding method, she couldn't just google it. (Google was founded in 1998.)

(The "secret" to finding accurate information on the Internet is to examine multiple sources and check them against one another.  Although I link to just two sources about secret Belgian binding, I consulted several more to confirm the accuracy of the information in those two. Never trust a single source! And be very suspicious if they use identical phrases—that's a clue that they probably all just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Not that Wikipedia is bad, as long as you check its sources and look to independently verify its factual statements.)