Bookmaking

 For as long as I can remember I have always loved books. All kinds of books, not just reading books. Everything from Encyclopedias to planners is fascinating to me. And of course I absolutely love reading books; it's my favorite pastime; my addiction.

 Bookmaking however has only been a relatively recent fascination. I got interested in bookmaking in a sort of roundabout way. For those who do not know, my religion falls under the Pagan umbrella and back when I first started learning and studying, all the books and people practicing talked about having personal books to keep all my notes, thoughts and beliefs in. One online mentor gave me the intriguing idea of scrapbooking. Scrapbooking is something I always found interesting and had done a few times in the past so I thought why not. However after searching long and hard I could not find the type of book I wanted. Nothing spoke to me even in stores, plus it was hard to find a book that I knew was easy to add pages to later on.



 Then I came across a blog post online which explained with pictures how to make a post bound book. It took me awhile but I bought all the materials (fell in love with the specialty paper section at the local art supply and stationary stores) and built my first book. The scrapbooking continued from there every once in awhile but I thought I was done. Then a few years later a group of friends were graduating and I wanted to make something for them instead of buying it. It took me awhile but after I came up with the idea of making small, personalized books for them I kept going until I had all six done. They came out great if I do say so myself. Here are pictures of four of them.

 I have not made many books since then because it takes a lot of time and space and my personal life went through a lot of changes not too long after that. But I've learned other styles of bookbinding, like Japanese ribbon binding. And I've taken the last year to study how others are binding, designing, marketing, pricing and selling their hand-made books since I had planned to include books in my Etsy shop from
the beginning.

 The thing is, books take a lot longer to make than my bath and body products and its more labor intensive especially since I don't have any of the expensive equipment that makes it easier. But lately, I've been getting the urge to make new books to put up for sale. The idea machine in my head has stopped churning out new ideas for body scrubs and bath soaks. I still have quite a few to unveil in the shop but I think I'll be physically focused on bookmarking for the next few months. My post next week will probably be a picture heavy post showing you my bookmaking process. I hope you guys will look forward to that. I can't wait for you all to see another side of my creative process.