Project "Belgium" - Wooden book for Lauren

A couple weeks ago, I discovered Pinterest - a virtual pinboard of everything awesome. Basically the idea is that if you see something on a blog or website you can make a "pin" of it and share it with the world. You can organize your pins onto different boards and keep up with ideas. If you're interested, here's all of my pinboards. One day while I was on pinterest, I saw a post about book binding/making and I was intrigued. I promptly researched book binding and made a new board focused on bookmaking [which is here]  At this point, I decided that I was going to make a book for Lauren.

My favorite bookbinding method that I found was the "Secret Belgian Binding" which actually yields a book with a spine, instead of just front and back covers.  I decided to step it up a little bit and make a book that had wooden covers, since I've been itching to use my scrollsaw recently.  I drew up this pattern in Illustrator and then let started picking out wood. I had a scrap piece of 1/4" baltic birch plywood. It sounds fancy but its really just the stuff I bought at Hobby Lobby awhile ago. Yay Hobby Lobby!

Anyway, I printed the pattern [black outlines, not this colored version] and cut out the pieces. I cut the holes out  and then cut all the shapes out separately. After cutting all the pieces, I stained the pieces to get different colors. I had a bunch of stain on hand from when I was testing out colors for my furniture, so I actually had the shades that I wanted. The L was stained with some Minwax "Golden Oak",  the leaves were done in the same Behr stain that I used for Lauren's Coasters and the Hearts were done in some kind of Minwax maple stain.

By the way, this is a perfect example- ALWAYS test your stain colors before using them. The maple stain was supposed to be a nice warm golden color...as you can see in these photos, it was very pink on pine. For this project, the pink worked out. For anything else though, that pink would have been disastrous

Once the stain dried I glued the pieces into the holes.  For this project, the little gaps didn't matter so I didn't bother filling them in. I drilled holes in the covers and then polyurethaned them and the spine.  I followed the Belgian Book Binding instructions from here.  I used 5 sheets cream colored paper folded in half per signature and I also added some green cardstock inside both covers. I used waxed linen string for the binding.

If you're curious, I attached the green cardstock to the cover using spray adhesive and I made the pages look a little homemade by running a razor along the edges of the paper.


And now for some pictures:

I'm really happy with how this turned out and Lauren seemed to enjoy it.  Now I'm going to head to bed because I've got terrible headache. Hope everyone has a good weekend!

Sneak Peak: Project "ChopChop"

Now that I've moved in to my new apartment, I've started started using my scrollsaw again. After the success of Project "Belgium"  I  decided to keep on going with a project I've had in mind for a little while.   I really enjoy cutting out stuff from one piece of wood and then using that to fill in holes on another piece of wood, to achieve a two color effect. This time the project needed to be food-safe, so I've been working with white pine and red oak instead of staining pine different colors. [I have this probably irrational idea that stained wood wouldn't be safe for this project. Who knows?]

Anyway, I created a stencil in Adobe Illustrator, printed it out and used spray adhesive to attach it to the wood. I cut out holes in the pine and cut out solid pieces in red oak.  Hopefully I'll get better at This project because right now my shapes don't fit in my holes perfectly. Because of the secret project info nature of this project, I have to completely fill in all of these holes before I can sand it. I think I'm going to use a watered down glue and then put saw dust into the holes.

I'll come back to this post when I get it finished and to the recipient. Until then, between my text and these two pictures, perhaps you can figure out what it is and who it's for.

Update 9/3: I've gotten the whole thing cut out. Now to sand it and fill in all those pesky gaps.