Okay, I'm way late in posting about this, but I couldn't just NOT do it. Recently The Bookbinding Etsy Street Team, of which I am a more than proud member, did a book swap with a fabulous 21 artists participating. The book I got was from surfbunny, and it is just gorgeous.


The little blurb from the team blog is here:

This book from SurfBunny, aka Duane, is made entirely of handmade paper. The cover is mulberry paper with included skeletal leaves, and the pages are kozo with silk fibers. Duane shares some interesting history behind this style of binding. "The binding is a pamphlet stitch variation of the Japanese Daifuku Cho [trans. Great fortune notebook] book. This type of book was carried by merchants of the Edo period who used them as account books. The tassels were usually quite long and allowed the book to be tied into the merchants belt for security."

I thought the history was fascinating, and really exciting, considering the fact that I'm half Japanese.


The picture really makes the book look impossibly soft and beautiful, doesn't it? Well, it's softer and prettier in real life. I'm half-considering handing this around at my wedding as a guest book... but I don't know if I want to do that. The idea of lots of (not so careful) people handling it makes me nervous!

This is the book that I made for the swap:


I call it "Flashdance" and it was really just an excuse for me to play with my new sewing machine. I had a blast making this journal, and hope to make ones similar to it in the future. :) The inside is just as colorful as the outside, filled with lots of bright happy pages.


It went to PrairiePeasant, who makes some particularly lovely travel journals. She was kind enough to rave about it on her blog here. :)