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.) 

Journal-making Season

My art-making tends to have its seasons, influencing what I work on at various times of the year based on external circumstances. I mean, I have my internal inspirations, which are both constant and constantly changing, but it's those immutable events throughout the year that cause me to set aside some things for the sake of completing others.

It's one of the reasons I sign up for my neighborhood art crawl, which takes place on the third weekend of September (except last year, because COVID, of course).  It's organized by the League of Longfellow Artists (LoLa) for creative folks in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis to showcase their artistic output. 

LoLa gives me a deadline that motivates me to finish things I've been dragging out, and make new things to show and, hopefully, sell. I also enjoy the face-to-face interaction with neighbors and strangers and people I know and others I only kind of know—although two days of that is quite enough for this introverted artist. After that, I'm quite happy to retreat to my studio and focus on completing the Useful Calendar— my next art-making season.

I really just wanted to show you some of the journals I've been making lately, but I felt the need to put them in some kind of context, and then the whole art-making seasons idea came to me. 

So. I make journals for the LoLa art crawl and then after the weekend I consign the ones that are left over with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in plenty of time for holiday shopping. In 2020, we cancelled LoLa, the MCBA was closed, and I didn't make any journals, so I was a little concerned that I may have forgotten how to make them. I did have to consult my notes for the first ones, but I soon got in the groove again. Like riding a bicycle, I suppose.

I always put a pocket inside the back covers, which holds a "library card" with  information about the journal, and my bookmark-style business card

The ones I'm showing you in this post are all casebound, with a flat spine rather than a curved one because they're a bit more user-friendly that way: you can make them lie flat when opened fairly easily. 

Casebound journals are a bit more involved than other types I also make, such as Coptic and secret Belgian, which I'll show you in my next post. For casebound journals, the spine is stitched, then glued, then reinforced with a fabric called mull and a strip of paper glued the almost-length of the spine. Optional but desirable is the addition of headbands at the top and bottom of the spine to protect the inner edges of the pages, and, one of my favorites, a ribbon page marker; because if I'm gluing all that stuff to the spine anyway, why not add that nifty little touch? 

You can buy headband material that looks like the old-style handstitched headbands, but when I read that binderies used to make them using leftover shirt fabric, I thought that was a really cool way to make my own. I wrap strips of cotton fabric around a hemp cord and glue it with the same PVA glue I use in the other stages of making the book. Then I select a color that goes with the cover and cut off a piece the width of the spine. (I wrote about making headbands in this post a few years ago, should you want to read more about it.) 

I've been using only supplies I already have on hand, and I make the journals in a range of sizes, largely determined by available materials. The red/postal journal shown at top and below is a full 5-1/2 by 8-1/2 inches, the next one is about half that size, and this last one, above, with William Morris's "Strawberry Thief" on the cover, is about 4 inches high.  I'll have a few in each size available for LoLa. 

To find me during LoLa, see my artist page on the LoLa website.

Here's a photo of my ribbons, mull fabric, and prepared headband strips, just for a little postscript. Some of the headbands really are made with fabric cut from my husband's worn-out shirts, others are just from scraps too small to use for anything else.

Little Boxes

I've been making little boxes this summer and it occurred to me that there's no need to keep that as my little secret, so let me tell you — and show you — a little bit about them. The boxes shown here (and more boxes yet to be made) will all be available at my site during the LoLa art crawl in September. (My page on the LoLa website is here.)

A couple of years ago I had taken an in-person class (remember those?) at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts on how to make a specific type of box called a clamshell, which are mainly made to protect old books. That's a worthwhile thing and I do intend to make them for the old Bibles that my husband and I each inherited from our mothers. But the real reason I took the class on making clamshell boxes was because it was the only box-making class being offered at the time.

So when they offered an introduction to box making via Zoom this June, I was happy to jump in. What I really want to make are small lidded boxes and that's what this class was about. The boxes we made for the class were about 4" by 6". After finishing those, I started making smaller ones, both because I really like small things and also because I like using up scraps and bits that are too small to make much, but that I like too much to discard.  

For example, in the photo above, the small neutral-colored box in the back to the left has a decorative square on the lid covered with a piece cut from a metallic gold envelope somebody used to send us a greeting card. And I'm really tickled by the blue-and-white one at the front, which is covered entirely in security envelopes, then topped with a vintage shanked button. That box is about 2" by 3" and is constructed with scrap chipboard left over from other projects.

This green box is a good example of using up leftover supplies. I bought the green book cloth this summer, but the rest of the materials I found by rummaging in my scraps. I've had the green paisley paper for a very long time and I don't know when or where I first acquired it. The lining of both the lid and the box (the bottom part of the box is called the tray) is the last of some scrapbooking paper I bought when I used to use that type of paper to make sleeves for my calendar cards. I love the distressed look and the pastel colors, especially pale pink! With subtle green polka dots! So I made a box small enough to use the available scraps I had.

The handle at the top, as you have no doubt guessed, is a vintage wooden game piece, like from Sorry or something. It has a lovely aged patina and is the perfect shade of green to go with the other materials, don't you think?

I'm also making journals for LoLa, and some of those are also small, to use up leftover materials. But that's a topic for a different blog post.

More new journals from old books — AND here comes the LoLa art crawl!

The annual LoLa art crawl is coming up in about a month and I need to get serious about making journals to build up my inventory!

LoLa stands for League of Longfellow Artists, which is a volunteer-run neighborhood arts group that's been going around this South Minneapolis neighborhood every year for nine (9!) years now. I'll be setting up shop at the adorable little yellow cottage that is the home studio of LoLa cofounder Bob Schmitt, Laughing Waters Studio.

This is all happening September 16–17, by the way.

So here's a look at a journal I recently completed, when I wasn't feeling quite so rushed so I took some pictures along the way which I won't be doing anymore for a while now.

I started with a vintage book with a pretty cover that I picked up at a Duluth shop called Chester Creek Books and Antiques. It was only a dollar and the pages were brittle and yellowed, so I figured it was OK to take it apart and give the cover a new life.

I've written before about how I enjoy taking apart old books to examine how they were made, kind of like a kid taking apart an old alarm clock or something (when my daughter was in preschool, the teacher asked for donations of such things and then had these 4-year-olds take them apart; one parent later remarked that her child knew the difference between a Philips and a flathead screwdriver after that). OK, that was a bit of a digression; back to the book.

I made an interesting discovery when I started taking this book apart, and that was that they had repurposed some other printed matter when constructing the spine. Today we talk a lot about reusing and repurposing materials, but in past decades they did that sort of thing as a matter of course. The blue paper is attached to the spine of the cover, and the teal scrap is glued over the spine of the text block, covering the stitching. 

I saved those scraps because I thought it would be cool to reuse them again in a collage. And I suppose it would have been really cool to use them in the journal I made from this book, but I set them aside to use later.

This book did not have headbands, which I wrote about in the above linked blog post (or just click here instead). Those are often another example where materials were repurposed, at least in mass-produced books. Traditional headbands in fine bookmaking are handstitched, but bookbinders in the late 19th and early 20th century would make them from scraps of shirt fabric, a practice I have also employed. (Actually, I use various cotton fabric scraps, including some from old shirts.)

In the above photo, you see the blank text block I made to fill the new journal, next to the original text block. The original text block appears to have been sewn with a kind of chain stitch, then was rounded, then coated with glue (probably a type of rubber cement), and then the strip of paper was pasted over that.

My assembly is a little different. First, I used a running stitch with the signatures interlaced together. 

Instead of rounding the spine, I keep it flat so that the journal will lay open more easily for writing in. I brushed on a synthetic flexible glue known as PVA that's acid-free, so it won't yellow or become brittle. 

Next I glued on the headbands to protect the edges (top and bottom), and attached a ribbon page marker with more PVA. Finally, I attached end papers with a thin strip of glue and then wrapped linen tape around the spine in two places, which takes the place of the paper used in this book, or the webbing often used in traditional fine bookbinding. 

Here's a view showing the end papers that I glued to each side of the text block. This hand-marbled paper (made by Sally Power) will be attached to the cover boards, over the original endpaper shown on the inside of the back cover.

Setting aside the text block for the moment, I made a new spine for the cover boards, reusing my own paper scrap from an old calendar I made a few years ago. Since it's my own scrap, I know that it's acid-free paper and won't get brittle. The cloth covering the spine is a black linen tape, the same type as the white tape used to reinforce the text block. 

And here's the finished journal. Come see it in person during LoLa.

It's Show Time!

Stuff! A random collection of small toys for kids.

Arty Didact (that's me) and other clever crafters will be selling handmade goods at the following events:

Nokomis Urban Craft Fair
Nokomis Community Center
2401 E. Minnehaha Parkway, Mpls. 55417
Saturday, Nov. 2, 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

Barton Open School Handmade Arts from the Heart
Barton school gym
4237 Colfax Ave. S., Mpls. 55409
Saturday, Nov. 9, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Book Arts Festival
Minnesota Center for Book Arts
1011 Washington Ave. S., Mpls. 55415
Saturday, Nov. 16, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
(I won't have Stuff! sets or bottlecaps at this one.)

HandmadeMN Fall Market
Ballentine VFW Post No. 246
2916 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls. 55408
Saturday, Nov. 23, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Women's Art Festival
Midtown YWCA
2121 E. Lake St., Mpls. 55407
Saturday, Dec. 14, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

A coptic stitch journal with beads in the spine

At the shows, I'll bring handbound journals, prints of my artwork (including tiny prints inside bottlecaps), book plates, mini chapbooks, calendars, cards, games, and quirky collections of small toys in little tins for kids.

Felted wool needle cases like this one are available from ArtyDidact on Etsy

Other items, such as needle cases, little purses and some artwork, will be available only through my Etsy shop. If you live in Minneapolis/St. Paul and wish to pick up your order instead of having it mailed, just use the contact option on Etsy to let me know and we'll make the arrangements (and, of course, I'll refund your shipping charges).

This post with the links to all the above craft shows is also available over in the righthand column under  Various Things, should you want to find it again sometime later.