A Bookbinders Favourite Tool
John - our Master Bookbinder
Our Unique Bone Folders
With a range of bookbinding tools now on offer to purchase from our online shop I thought it'd be timely to give you a little insight into our favourite one!
A bone folder is, unsurprisingly, traditionally made of bone, although these days you can find them produced in a few other materials. including brass and teflon.
It's purpose is primarily for paper folding, card making and origami but it has other uses. We use it for covering boxes and poking the cloth into all the nooks and crannies. It is also perfect for adding a little extra glue to a job, rubbing down paper to make sure it sticks and on the odd occasion I have seen it used for stirring coffee in our workshop!
You can see our small range of bone folders now in our online shop - all of ours started off life just like one of those. One of the reasons we are all so attached to our own particular folder is that they adapt and change as you use them. The way you rub every single spine when lining often creates a dip in one side. Sometimes we sharpen the end a little to get into a small space and unfortunately sometimes they break and so we shorten them and reshape them to continue their life. And needless to say we are in a complete panic when we misplace our folder!!
Mia - a beautiful array of shapes and sizes!
David - a name tag so no-one pinches it!
Kerry - relatively new clean ones!
Mine - one of these is teflon - non stick!
Gillian & Robin - Robin's sadly broke today!
Erin - a particularly pointed one for box making!
Check out our ever expanding online shop to see our current range of tools and materials. We don't sell anything that we don't use on a daily basis here in our workshop so it is all to true production bookbinding standard - and why not pick yourself up your own bone folder? It really is a bookbinders favourite tool!
Bookbinding Classes
Come to one of our Workshops
Our classes usually run two Saturdays a month from 10am until 4pm creating a range of products. You can take our courses all the way through Introduction and Intermediate to the Advanced class, or you could try Box Making, Book Repair or Coptic Sewing. We only have a couple of classes left before Christmas but the schedule for the New Year is organised already and bookable online in our shop. We are surprised at how quickly we are getting bookings for 2017 already so get in fast to avoid disappointment!
We usually only accomodate up to 8 people on a day - we like to keep it intimate! We only have limited space in the workshop - there are 8 or 9 of us working in the bindery on a regular basis so it's only really designed for us! It also means that you get a lot more one-on-one attention at the class which is better for you!
John, our Master Bookbinder, and myself are usually the ones who teach the classes. John did his apprenticeship straight from school and has been working in the industry all his life. As there are very few training programmes available for bookbinding John has been responsible for training everyone in our workshop on the job, so he is the ideal person to teach anyone from absolute beginner to more advanced levels.
Before I started working here at Downie Allison Downie, several years ago now, I took a couple of classes with John purely to feed an interest for beautiful handmade sketchbooks which began for me at art school. Just seeing the workshop and all the things going on here is quite inspiring and many of the peole who have previously joined us for classes now bind or repair books as a hobby at home, some even make a little money from selling the books they make!
As handmade, and small craft industries are becoming more valued it is a great time to try out a new skill and learn to appreciate the time and effort which goes into creating a hand made product. Hand binding uses very little equipment so it is ideal to do from your kitchen table, and the variety of what you can produce is endless!
Classes for Christmas
As Christmas is approaching you can of course buy vouchers for our classes as gifts! The vouchers can be used to book any class and so the lucky recipient can come to a class of their choice.
Classes for Groups
We can also organise classes for groups of varying sizes, either in our workshop or at your venue. You can read about the class we ran at the Glasgow School of Art a short while back in this article.
If you are interested in organising a class, or even just a talk about bookbinding, for your group then you can contact us for more information and we will do our best to accomodate your needs and suggest options for you.