Bookbinding, week 11

So, the case I made last week was the wrong size. The spine was about 5mm too wide as can be seen in the picture below.

Let's skip over me making a second case and get to the point where I could finally glue the lid and tray to the case. First the lid:

Bookbinding, week 10

Below is a photograph of the tray and the lid of the box, now covered and lined. When the lining is glued in it needs to be weighted or pressed to ensure it ends up completely flat. What I forgot to photograph was the other side, which is currently uncovered. A case will cover the other side and connect both pieces.

Stack: March

This month's delivery – The Ride Journal – was the kind of thing I was expecting from Stack: a really compelling magazine that I would not have bought for myself because it's about a subject I have no interest in. Ostensibly this is a cycling magazine and as I'm the sort of nervous cyclist who can't take her hands of the handlebars I wouldn't have bought a cycling magazine in a hundred years. But The Ride Journal isn't here to tell you what bike to buy, instead its contributors write short pieces about their personal relationship to cycling. There are articles about competing in races and designing bikes, about people met while cycling and strange places cycled across. There's a brilliant pair of articles about bicycle theft called “Thief” and “Taken”. There's a man who writes about the bike rides he made following the death of his infant son and a woman who writes about abandoning cycling as a teenager after a bike ride led her to discover her mother's infidelity. There's a series of photos showing a morning commute through London and another one showing a muddy, cross-country race in Belgium. It's about cycling, whatever that means to its readers and writers.

It looks stunning too; most articles are accompanied by gorgeous illustrations in a huge range of styles. It's even heftier than and it breaks up its uncoated pages with some glossy photographic sections such as the Belgian race photographs. It's beautiful and interesting and I'm really pleased to have received a copy.

Would I buy it again? Not for myself, but I would definitely get this as a gift for a keen cyclist.

Bookbinding, week 9

The lid of the box is basically made the same way as the tray, only it's slightly bigger so it fits over the tray. Let's skip that and move on to something new: lining the tray and the lid. Measure the width and height of the inside of the tray, (if one side is shorter than the other use the smaller measurement), then deduct 1mm from each measurement. Cut two pieces of board to this size.

Bookbinding, week 8

After getting off to a bad start with the box, (measure twice, cut once!), I'm back on track. The first step was cutting the pieces for the tray.

Artist Textiles at the Fashion and Textile Museum

Entry: £8.80 adults / £6.50 concessions / £5.50 students

The Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey currently has a great exhibition of textiles designed by fine artists of the 20th century. Ranging from the 1910s to the 1960s, it shows how loose the boundaries between art and commercial design really are, showcasing mass-produced printed textiles by artists including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Joan Miró.

The material on show is primarily textile samples. There are also plenty of items of clothing, some advertising material, and some surrealist film footage. Overall it's a fun, light-hearted exhibition – you get the sense that the artists got a chance to kick back and play around with themes and motifs they were best-known for when doing this kind of commercial design work. It's also fascinating to see how these artists embraced the opportunity to make their work more widely available to the public; Picasso was even involved in designing prints for a range of skiwear! I was surprised by how much I liked Andy Warhol's simple, playful designs, and I loved Dalí's “Desert Rocks” fabric.

Overall, I spent an enjoyable hour looking around, although I suspect that the price is off-putting unless you're particularly into textile design.