Polymer clay mini-notebook

This swap is for a small handmade notebook with polymer clay covers. It is beginner friendly - for beginners at clay and/or book making. When rating your partners, please take this into account. Although your notebook does not have to be technically perfect, please put care and effort into it, and send something you would be happy to receive and which is 'fit for purpose'.

I strongly encourage you all to try to make the notebook itself, and I will put links to some tutorials below, but for this swap it is allowable to buy a small notebook and securely attach your polymer clay covers to it. Remember, though, that the covers should be slightly larger than the inner pages, and that the covers must open enough for the book to open properly. Please also remember you are making a notebook, not a notepad - the pages are supposed to stay together, not be torn out as they are used.

The details

The notebook must be between 2.5" and 4.5" (6.3cm and 11.4cm) in its longest direction, and between 2" and 3.5" (5.1cm and 8.9) in its shortest direction.

It must have at least 20 pages - a page is defined as one side of one leaf

You can use any paper you choose for the pages and any polymer clay technique for the covers as long as the notebook will withstand frequent use.

You must have an overall rating of at least 4.85 to join, no 3s in the past 3 months and no 1s in the past 6 months. If you feel you have an unfair rating, please PM me before joining. I will ban if I have any reason to believe you will not be a good swap partner. You must communicate with both me and your partner if you are late for any reason. If there are any problems, please try to work it out with your partner, but if that is not possible, contact me and I will try to help. Please do not give a 3 or 1 rating without giving your partner a chance to fix the situation.

Tutorials

Book binding:

My own first notebook (see the swap picture above) was bound using Coptic stitch, which works well for small books, opens flat, works with solid covers and is a lot easier than it looks. It has 42 pages = 84 sides. Ribbon bindings are a bit more stable than Coptic stitch ones. Stab-bound books are easy to make but don't open flat, and you would need to figure out a way to hinge the front cover as you can't just score it. Accordion books are easy, but you need to have a long strip of paper or join shorter pieces. For other ideas, try googling "book binding tutorial".

• altered-book.com - a very good tutorial
• High School Books - good diagrams
• Coptic stitch video
• Another Coptic stitch video
• Traditional sewn binding
• Sewn onto a cloth spine
• Stab binding
• Ribbon binding - just for how she sews the book to the ribbons, then instead of attaching the covers as she does, I would glue it to the polymer clay covers, possibly threading the ribbon through slits cut in the clay before firing. In another book, I combined the ribbon idea (without the interlacing) and Coptic stitch.

Polymer clay books:

• Accordion book - this one ends up with only 10 sides, but you can expand it by joining in other strips of paper, or by sewing some extra pages into some of the folds
• Stab-bound book - I'm not keen on this one as the clay is covered by the clear plastic, and the pages would not lie flat, making it harder to use
• Spiral pad - I think that as long as they weren't too thick, you could take a bought spiral notebook, remove the spiral and then replace the covers with the clay ones
• Wish book - it would be possible to replace the pages in this one
• Altered journal cover - using a bought notebook
• and just one more here and here - not a tute but too beautiful not to include as inspiration.

If you have any questions, please ask them in the swap comments or in the group, or PM me.