A Book Bound in Atlas

Yesterday I went into Birmingham for a meeting of the Midlands Textile Forum. I had intended to do some Christmas shopping but the number of people trying to do the same thing meant that, after I had bought a book token, I caught the next train home. I turned a whole lot more yarn into skeins while watching a film and that was that for the day. Except that I made some gooseberry jam with my own gooseberries taken from the freezer.

I woke up this morning feeling disgruntled, because I have several jobs I need to do for other people. And decided not to do any of them. Instead I finished off the book made of mulberry bark paper. Photos of the inside and outside are shown below.

The paper is very irregular in size and thickness and some sheets are practically tissue paper. The fabric cover is of Atlas bought in Khotan. Atlas has a crammed warp of tie-dyed cotton woven as 1 5:1 twill with a weft of fine silk. The texture is very smooth and luxurious. As a book it is fairly useless because any writing in ink promptly spreads.

There are lots of processes involved in making a cased-in (=hardback) book and there is a waiting time for glue to dry between each step. So I wound up more skeins of handspun. There is a whole large rubbish bag of yarn yet to do.

Last night I wove a header on the Megado and then looked for errors. These were very difficult to see with the waistcoat fabric but I had a feeling there were a few threads missing. The errors are marked up now and I need to check out each one. I have  a draft ready for the Convergence yardage entry  but am also thinking of binding a book with a similar fabric. In fact, the binding is a bit ambitious and needs a copy of ThermoFaxes making. I will not do these until I am sure the fabric is going to work.