Weekly Bookbinding Report: timings, sewing, learning

Week seven as an apprentice bookbinder at York Bookbinding

Week seven at York Bookbinding entailed sewing magazines into book blocks onto three tapes and repairing old football pamphlets.

Helen also showed me how she was working on this large old book. It needed to stay on the treads but the sewing needed to be reinforced. This is difficult to do with it being fragile and so large, so she engineered a system for a cradle that holds the pages to allow her to work in and around the book.

Week seven accomplishments:

• Independently carried out tasks on live work.
• Sewed two magazine collections onto three tapes.
• Worked through repairing more football pamphlets.

Before

After

Using a needle to unfold the delicate paper and the iron to flatten, removing the creases.

New skills acquired during week seven:

Sewing onto three tapes.

The magazines all sewn up.

What I need to improve on:

• Timings; picking up pace.
• Write the correct working directions for next stage.
• Glue to cover holes for side sewing.

The holes didn't make it through during sawing.

So I had to use an awl to poke them back in to be able to sew. I ended up just poking holes for the ones I needed a guide for as the others I could just push the needle through, using the saw cuts as a guide.

Notes of the week:

• Write on the endpaper, not the fly sheet.
• Write all info needed for the next stage of binding.
• Cover all of the drill holes with the glueing of endpapers.
• Questions are always worth asking if unsure.
• Check everything, always, at every stage.