222 Plate Box notebook

Awhile back I had saved these pretty boxes which once held peacock and paisley decorated plates. They were pretty, and I thought of multiple ideas on how to use them.

Several days ago I put these boxes to use, and made two of them into a book cover. Mom had a notebook that was falling apart and I kept the pages together with a clip till I was ready to work on it. The original cover was tearing away from the end papers, and it was once sewn with a coptic stitch style. I decided to replicate this, but with a new cover and a few added papers to pull things together.

I followed the instructions by Sea Lemon on Youtube to get the coptic stitch right, and in the end was pleased with the binding.

It looks interesting from the side, allows the book to lay completely flat when open, and doesn't require me to make a spine.

The stitching that holds the cover to the pages is exposed from the front and back. It kind of looks like a Japanese binding in some ways, but more flexible.

For the inner covers I used white card stock and stamped it with some of my favorite paisley styled stamps, to match the design of the box. I coated these stamped papers with Liquitex satin varnish.

I had to add some papers to loose front and back pages so I could fold them in half and add them to a signature. This only needed to be done in two spots of the book, on the front signature and the back signature.
I used some tan calligraphy paper for this, to go with the cream shade of the note pages which had slightly tan grunge patterns printed on them.

The front signature's added page came out a bit shorter than it was suppose to, but I left it. Thankfully the back signature came out properly.

Most of the signatures had been sewn together, so I yanked out the old thread that had broken in places, then used new cording to bind it through the already existing holes.

One odd thing about my experiment with the coptic stitch is that it left a slight gap between some signatures, which doesn't bug me, it's just a note to remember stitching might not tighten as much as it could.