Last Saturday at Lincolnshire Textiles it was a “Creative Corners” day, and I opted for the Japanese book-binding sessions with Janet Taylor. It was a fun and informative workshop. Janet had been very generous with the time she had spent preparing packs with paper, including a beautiful marbled sheet for each of us, instructions and materials for us to use. She had also ready-prepared samples for our reference Blue Peter style.

The plan had been to do four samples and a book in the morning session, and we all got off to a flying start. We folded and cut or ripped an A4 sheet into four A6 pieces, folded them in half and pricked out the relevant number of holes. We did the simplest first, the four-hole binding (Yotsume Toji), which looks the same front and back as they all do. We started the stitching in the second hole from the left on the front, and worked to the right along to the next hole and down, up over the top and back down, along to the right on the back, repeating this to the end. Then we came back to the left, filling in the gaps, and then back to the second hole, where the two ends were taken in to the middle and tied off with a reef (or square) knot. Simple!

The Noble Binding (Kangxi Toji) worked out well too.

We all seemed to think we’d cracked it and started the Hemp Leaf binding (Asa-no-ha toji). Ha! We got a bit muddled with this one, and most of us had to do rather a lot of unpicking and working backwards. It was more complicated, and had we just got complacent? As you can see from my third one down, I hadn’t measured properly either, which added to the problems (the dots I put in at the end show where the stitches should have been). By this time Janet had realised that getting the book done before lunch was over-ambitious and, rather than spoil the book, just to do the Tortoise shell binding (Kikko toji) before we stopped. This was less complicated, and we soon had it done; whether we were more careful and aware of the pitfalls, or it really was easier, I’m not sure.

Janet had made a little box of folded paper for each of us to keep all our samples in, a useful resource for future reference.

After lunch we started our books, each choosing which pattern we wanted to use. Janet had given us a sheet of variations that had been the original plan for the afternoon session, and I chose Hemp leaf variation 1. The yellowy gold thread was more inclined to tangle than the burgundy that I’d used in the morning, but I liked the colour with the marbling.

The back looks good too.

Some of us had time to do more of the variations once the book was finished. I only managed one, a version of the Five hole variation, which should have had equal gaps between the three straight stitches. You can see that I made mistakes on the graph paper version, but the stitched one is what I was aiming for. The stitches need a bit of straightening up as I was rushing to finish before we had to pack up. Someone pointed out they look like piano keys, and that’s another thing to get back to!

I certainly came home with more ideas to try. Thank you, Janet, and thanks to Brenda Scarman for organising the day.