How to EASILY make a Leather Bound Book

Hey folks let's get right to it. We're doing a simple leather book video. I'm just going to be taking some eight-and-a-half by 11 pages and folding them to make my leaves for the book. I'm gonna do five of them, and each one has five pages. Then I'm just gonna quickly figure out the size of my cover, make my edges straight... and then eyeball how much overlap I want for the cover to the pages now I'm just giving it another quick eyeball for the width of the pages when they're all in the book cover itself then I'll square everything up and cut the last two sides of my cover I'm just matching both sides so I can draw a line there's the spine of my book now remember that's not where your pages are going they're gonna go inside that line that's where the fold is for your cover grab papers great for figuring out your holes for your pages there are three stitches that I run through all five sets of pages and so I'm marking 10 holes at the top tunnels at the bottom tunnels in the middle and that's where I'll run my stitches so this is just making our pattern that'll help us put the pattern on the cover and the pattern on the pages we just punch all your holes and then what we're gonna do is transfer one line of those holes to the pages and then all of those holes to the cover pattern I use a ruler just to make sure my holes don't waver a little bit sometimes you're you think you're punching in a straight line and it really isn't at all so I'm just using one of these rows down the spine or down the center fold of the pages and we've got to match up we throw some holes in them and we throw some holes in all five this style of book is really pretty simple to do I was looking on YouTube and it seems like there's a lot of more intimidating books if at first glance so I figured if somebody wanted to make a book for the first time this would be a great way of doing it it's got minimal tools and it doesn't seem very intimidating so and it looks pretty cool too in the end all right now I'm just eyeballing it because that's what I do throwing the holes onto my cover now we'll punch all these and then that'll be our completed cover pattern the leather I used here was I think it was seven ounce budget an use a little thinner if you want now I'm beveling only one side of this because I'm gonna put some other leather on the backside to make smooth inner covers you don't necessarily have to do that so if you're not going to do the leather on the inside then just bevel both sides alright folks once you've got this piece done then all you need to do is carve it and it'll be great this will be in another video now I'm setting up my lines for my V gouge which is the device that will cut lines into the cover and make it so the pages the cover folds easier so I would just copied them from my pattern and draw some lines then we'll get the V gouge to work here pretty simple it's got a groove it's adjustable be careful with it you could just go right through your entire piece of leather and ruin your cover really quickly so take it easy do it out check it off and and make sure you're not going all the way through especially after you've carved it like I've carved it that would really suck just occasionally fold it see how your covers doing until you're happy with it obviously again be careful now I'm prepping my inside cover I recommend making it bigger than I have here make it big enough so that it's got some overlap when you glue it down and then when you cut it away it'll be a nice crisp edge instead of trying to guess your way along you can see I've made it a little bigger at the bottom here but it's not really enough just like the main cover you want to make sure you're only beveling one side of these so when you glue it together there is no obvious separation between the inside cover parts and the outside cover I like Pro die it dies nice and even we're just want right now to get a base color on it that's hopefully fairly light I've decided to use my Angeles die pens to color the not work that I carved and because of this the whole image is gonna end up a little darker than it would if you were to use an acrylic paint I'm not really worried about being messy because I'm gonna use a stain to fix it all up in the end if you really want your design to pop use acrylic paint and then apply a resist and then use some antique finish I'm gonna probably do a video like that shortly but for this one I wanted it more dark and aged looking what's gonna end up happening here is I'm gonna apply a finish to this that will act as the resist so that we can put our antique on it now because I've you just die to color it that resist is gonna permeate a little bit and darken everything i've i'd use paint here everything would probably be a little brighter have you satellite before it works great I'd never used Angela's Matt finished before so I decided to try it and it worked out all right I love my spray gun by the way if you uh if you have an air compressor grab spray gun so you can see everything that's gonna darken up here then I'm just gonna add a JAL antique and wipe it away and it's gonna make everything pop a lot better I think I would have liked for it to have a little more contrast but I'm pretty happy with it now just for continuity we've got to do the same technique to the journal inner cover so put a finish on it and then put an antic stain on it to get the same color you could apply finish over this I never have it's never really been a problem but if you are gonna reply finish over it you probably have to spray it on no matter what if you wipe it on it's pretty smeary super 77 use a gas mask this tape was perfect fit exactly along now remember that you've cut gouges in for your cover folds when you glue your inner cover on you can't have it covering that gouge because when you fold it up its gonna be on the inside and it'll block it from folding all the way so make sure it's just a little bit outside that gouge you'll see where I place it here so you can still see the gouge it's the easiest way of describing it we go flatten it down cut away your excess and then just do a little final hammer to make sure everything's seated pretty good quite often I will machine stitch the edges of these books but I've decided to just see how it'll hold up without stitching it we also need to hit the edge with some dye again as well so after we've hammered it down hit the edge with some dye we're going to apply some beeswax to the edge of the book and burnish the edge oh and first we gotta wipe away a little excess dye yeah little beeswax it'll help smooth out the edge with my burnisher now I'm just showing you the burnisher that most people have something like this and you grind away at the edge and it'll smooth it up with some friction in time but I prefer just to use this which is a lot easier so that's it the cover is done now it's time to meticulously stitch pages into your book a few things here make sure that you're not pulling too hard and make sure your holes are lined up pretty well because if they're not you're gonna get tearing in your pages so whenever you've done a stitch snug it down put them brief on it because you made two other bridges there's a few different patterns so you can do to make these fancier but this one's pretty straightforward it's just kind of an X pattern when I'm done just going down through the center up through the center down through the center and back oh and the threat I've been using is some wax threat from tandy this is some of the lighter wax cut that I as far as wax quantity goes some of the lighter stuff I've used and it's I like it more than the heavily wax threat I'm not sure how to describe which throat it is though it's been sitting in my box for a while and blend needles you don't need to jab see or anything now the one thing that I don't end up doing on this book is any kind of closure or wrap around the book you can experiment with different things a lot of people will stitch 1/2 inch 3/4 inch wide strip of leather into the spine and then it just wraps around the vocal poset sure there's lots of options you can find the quick Google search online but sometimes you don't even need a pleasure definitely if they done any rap on this book it would certainly cover up the pretty not work I put on it so gotta make a decision on what's more important to you now since we're working on the pages right now it's a good time to remind people that you should definitely have clean hands when you do this minor mostly clean here and I didn't transfer much to the pages glad I finally got around to doing this video as I've been talking about it for way too long one more stitch to go through the book and another camera angle because I keep experimenting with how I'm gonna do things only I could stitch that fast and real life well that's about it hopefully I can get more videos up to you guys in the future I've been slacking a little bit this book itself I'm gonna throw up on my Etsy shop and see if anybody wants to buy it thanks for watching you

Channel: Dark Horse Workshop

Views: 523,239

Rating: 4.9320774 out of 5

Keywords: making leather book, make a leather book, making a leather bound book, making a leather book, how to make a leather bound book, how to leather bind a book, how to make a leather book, leather book, leather bound books, how to make leather book, leather book binding, making a leather book cover, making leather bound books, making a book, how to make a leather journal, how to easily make a leather bound book, how to easily make a book, how to make a book, a book, make, making, diy

Id: a8Uf8xTsdI0

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/tydalt]

I made myself a leather bound journal about a year ago.

Now I wish I would have filmed a "how-to" or something detailing the process.

It turned out ok I guess. Waddaya think?

Cover

Opened

[u/samgam74]

Does 10 pages for a 1" thick book seem absurd to anyone else?

[u/vegaslonnie]

I bet your apartment smells of rich mahogany.

[u/mesopotamius]

Not a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean knockoff music going on in the background

[u/Ludachrism]

"EASILY"

[u/Ojrsh]

I don't know why I expected human leather, maybe because I play Rimworld too much.