I participated in the most recent SF Underground Market with a bookbinding demo using scrap materials. The call came on Wednesday to participate on Saturday night. I love what this group stands for, so I said yes with very little clue as to what I would do. True to form I stay up until past four in the morning Friday night, have to be in San Francisco by 9am for my TA/mentoring duties. When I went to bed I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I had some ideas, but none seemed quite right. The short sleep must have been enough, because I awoke with the answer: forage during my day for that evening's supplies.
I left the house with a few basic tools: awl, bone folder, needle, waxed linen thread, and cutting board. In addition, I had my normal kit with cutting blade, glue sticks, stencils, pens, and my other daily basics. As I leave my house I know I've committed myself to a potentially dangerous path. During bookbinding class, I foraged some one sided paper that was syllabii and other dated material from previous semesters. I took a few various sized bits of corrugated cardboard and some magazines destined for the recycle bin.
At the show, I set up my gear upstairs in a dark corner and proceed to make books from these scraps. I demoed a variety of folded books from a single sheet of paper. First up a couple of books with an 8 page structure.
A trio (I gave one away!) of the 8 page sheets were covered in some sticky (just with glue) cardstock, pamphlet stitched. and simply decorated with stenciled words on the front.
Three others became a faux longstitch with a nice cardstock cover made from a heavy magazine cover.
A 16 page spiral book.
A 16 page spiral book.
And a 32 page spiral book.
I also demoed a no-glue, no-sew book made from wrapping magazine pages around some of the cardboard.
The other structure I demoed was a chinese star.
Probably a dozen people joined in the fun and I definitely made some new bookbinding enthusiasts. One nice man, Will, hung out for a good long time, made a few different structures and even filled one with his own original cartoons. He was a quick learner and helped show off some samples.