Sketchbook, handmade

When I took part in the Bauhaus-workshop by Margit Amann vonGlembotzki in November we were all given a welcome present by the organizer of the workshop, Dörte Bach. She had bought very nice sketchbooks for each participant, measuring 12 x 12 inch. Simply bound, but very pleasing to look at and hold.

Spontaneously I decided to make this my sketchbook for the workshop, although I did feel the urge to save it for future use. But what future occasion could be better suited than immediate employment?

Prior experiences with notepads and sketchbooks, either ringed or tightly bound had led me to just bring a stack of paper which I was going to have bound after the workshop, when I would have developed any pictures I wanted to include in it. But this beautiful sketchbook immediately changed my mind, and throughout the entire workshop I was always pleased to open it and enter more information, or glue the sheets of paper into it that we received as material. We received a number of copies that I glued next to each so that you can fold them up easily, but that they don’t all sit on top of each other, adding to the thickness of the whole thing. Thanks to 12 inches of paper size several pages could be added next to each other:

Here you can see a few more pages from the book. Photos were glued on the backsides of the copies, into empty spaces, or sometimes onto extra pages that I added:

The sketchbook now contains the entire workshop up to its last page and is a wonderful memory and stock of ideas.

Dörte Bach was so kind and did give me the link to the place where she gets these wonderful books.

After the workshop, however, I was so inspired about this new experience with a sketch- and notebook that I started making my own. I still had large sheets of paper which I had obtained a while ago because I thought I would again take up book binding. This hadn’t happened, though, and the paper was still sitting there, waiting to be used.

At first I cut the large sheets into smaller pieces. 

They ended up being 10 by 14 inches. Not exactly square as the inspirational one, but not bad as a format either – some of them in landscape orientation, others in vertical orientation.

The paper store downtown had two pieces of interesting paper that would be perfect for the outside. Leftover from a long-ago order, so really cheap.

Then I punched the holes.

And used my Shibori-thread for the binding.

Finally I folded the extending pieces of outside paper over the first and last pages of the booklet and sewed them tight with a zig-zag stitch.

Probably not usable as a sketchbook to drag along with you on a long hike or journey, but certainly well suited to use as a sketchbook in a workshop.

I will not be producing these in large numbers, although it was a lot of fun. But there are still a few more large sheets of paper left, so if I find another suitable piece of carton paper for the outsides, I might make a few more.