Special Commission: Sweet Baby Rose

Sweet Baby Rose. 4 x 6. Encaustic & Mixed Media on Paper. © 2009 Haley Nagy. SOLD.

I just finished binding the special commission I received last week. Before I show you the final product, I wanted to give you an overview of the process itself.

The patron of this project (Rose’s godmother) provided the content to be bound into a book. In her beautiful, calligraphic hand she created a set of pages filled with transcriptions from the funeral of Rose Marie Kerner, including her speech, the lyrics from the songs, the obituary and more. As you can imagine, these were written on loose-leaf, linen paper instead of copied onto folded signatures, which presented me with a small challenge. This format limited the kind of binding I could use to either a perfect binding or an Asian binding. I found that a Japanese tortoise shell binding worked perfectly, though I had to make the spine abnormally narrow due to the relatively small margin allowance.

I used the Japanese binding method on the fourteen duplicates which were prepared for distribution to various family members. However, I decided to give the original copy a very special binding with wooden covers using the supposed Secret Belgian Binding method. (Yes, this choice was inspired by the wooden books of Daniel Essig and Jim Croft. I only wish I had their skills and resources so I could have used real wood instead of craft plywood).

First I cut the wooden covers to size (a little bigger than 8.5 x 11) and used a pencil to mark where the holes should be drilled. Again I must thank my woodworking friend Scot Eddy for his assistance in cutting the wood. Although it was soft enough to be cut through diligent use of a craft blade and t-square, he saved me a significant amount of time by doing it for me with his professional tools.

After sanding down the edges, I simply used an old nail to drill holes into the wood. I hammered it in, pulled it out, and re-hammered it in again from the other side. Low-tech, but effective!

Once I ensured that a needle and thread could fit through the holes, I stained the wood with Minwax Dark Walnut wood stain. I painted two coats, allowing each to dry for eight hours. Then I painted two coats of polyurethane with a dry time of three hours each. This series of steps put me a bit behind schedule as I didn’t anticipate how slowly the stain would dry during a bout of unusually cold and damp Austin weather.

Time to sew the covers! Don’t let the simple appearance of the Belgian Binding method fool you. It took three tries before I got the correct tension between the covers. What the online tutorial neglects to say is that you should use a mock-up block of paper as a guide for how close to sew the covers. Constantly folding the cover around the block of paper is the only way I was able to get accurate results.

Next I glued my “Sweet Baby Rose” encaustic painting (on paper) onto the front cover. If I could do it over again, I would have carved a small recess into the wood for the placement of this painting in order to protect it from damage. It is probably time for me to start teaching myself some basic woodworking techniques so I can avoid these problems in the future. In the final step, I cased in the original, handwritten papers using a simple stitch spiraled around the interior threads along the spine. For more information on how I sewed the interior pages see “How to Bind a Typed Report” from Rob Shepherd’s book Handmade Books: An Introduction to Bookbinding.

Here’s a gallery of the final product, including the duplicate copies.

P.S.

If you are interested in learning more about the journey this family has undergone, you may listen to a couple of radio broadcasts about baby Rose from the radio show Threads of Grace by Sally Robb:

January 2, 2009
January 7, 2009
January 9, 2009
January 12, 2009
January 15, 2009
March 16, 2009

You may also send words of comfort and encouragement to the family via their CaringBridge website.