Binding Stitches: Soft Leather Journals

Original post by Sarah @ Renewed Upon a Dream, please visit her website for more great ideas!”

Ok, so this post is a couple of days late.  Please forgive me!  I actually just got back from vacation!  I was gone from Thursday of last week ’till Tuesday morning in St. Thomas!   We had a great time, a tropical vacation was very much needed.  But now I’m pretty happy to be back & ready to get back into the swing of things before the holidays are upon us!  They are coming so soon!!!

Last week I introduced you to my quarter leather journals on cords.  And the week before that it was my  coptic stitch bindings.  This week I’m going to focus on my soft leather journals.

My soft leather journals currently come in two different sizes.  The large ones are about 6.8 by 5 inches.

And the smaller ones measure about 5 by 3.5 inches.

I also provide these in a few different styles.  Some are my leather & lace journals, which always include a strip of pretty lace on the cover.  Some of these fold over, some don’t.  The other style I do is just the leather, without lace.  Most of these fold over (like the brown little notebook above) and are held together with some type of closure, be it a hook or button or cord made of an extra strip of leather or braided waxed thread.

Each of these books, large or small, contains 120 pages.  They are all sewn to the leather with waxed thread in 6 sections of 20 pages each.  Each page is torn by hand, just like in my other books.

The materials used in these books include:

*Leather
*Waxed thread for binding
*Text or artist paper (hand torn to size)
*Embellishments (buttons, hooks, lace, etc)

Yes, they use a lot less materials than some of the others.  But they do have their own challenges, as leather can be somewhat difficult to work with & pretty unforgiving in certain ways.

Still, these are some of my favorite books to create.  They don’t take as long as some of the others because there are less steps involved in getting the covers ready, but the materials are more expensive (leather costs more than paper, who would have thought?)

These journals would make great gifts for the holidays!  The small ones are pocket-sized & make great little jotter notebooks & the large ones are beautiful for use as travel journals, diaries, notebooks, planners or pretty much anything you can think of!  The lace ones are great for girls & women, and the ones without lace have a rustic feel, great for anyone!

I have a bunch of these soft leather journals pre-made & ready to ship in my shop.  I’m also willing to make the perfect one for you.  If you want a different size, different closure style, different color, different lace etc… let me know & I’ll work with you to see what I can do.  I love working on custom orders!  Just send me a message here & I’ll get to work on your custom book right away!

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