A couple of years ago we had a housewarming party, and I asked guests to donate any old jeans they had to ‘a craft project’ I was planning. I got a lot more jeans than I was expecting. The project was a rag rug, which has been in my lounge room ever since, and I’ve decided to make another one. To do that I needed more cotton rug warp so recently I rang Glenora Weaving & Wool and, of course, a few more things slipped into my order:

It turned out I was three issues behind on Handwoven. Quite good issues, too.

I also ordered a sample card of linen, because I noticed that the price of a reel of linen for weaving (right) is about the same as the price of a reel of unwaxed linen bookbinding thread (left), yet there was four times as much in it and came in a range of colours.

Only down side is that I don’t really need four times as much. Especially if I buy a colour I’m not likely to use too often.

Another recent purchase, thanks to Fishpond for giving me a $10 off voucher, was Eco Books:

Though I was lusting after it, I’d hesitated to buy it because I’m getting quite a collection of books. But my justification for getting yet another bookbinding book is that it has one technique in it that none of my books appear to include: coptic binding. Like on these cassette tape books:

This palm leaf book gave me an idea for using up excess photos from holiday albums. (Though I’m not doing the tree bit.) I’ll be posting about that one later this week.

This one caught my eye and made me wish I liked coffee. It’s made of coffee filters and looks like some sort of tribal artefact.

I do, however, drink tea. But I’m not sure I’d want to attempt to save all the teabags required to make this Faux Leather Journal. And I suspect that the tea bags used in this are the cloth type, whereas the tea I drink uses paper bags that break down in the compost.

And does this look familiar? Yep, some books made from fused plastic bags.

While the book is full of interesting (and sometimes amusing) ways of turning stuff you might throw away into books, I found the format a little lacking. The actual bookbinding methods are at the back, and are described rather than step-by-step, which is a bit vague and seems to assume familiarity. But the individual project instructions can be a bit in the other direction – telling you to how to do something that’s a bit obvious. Some of the projects are followed by featured work by the creator, some don’t. Some have multiple photos and cover more pages than they probably need, while others get only one page and you’re left wondering what they look like inside.

It has the feel of a book that was cut back and re-arranged at the last moment. Another bit of strangeness is how some projects have been blurred to hide the brand name of the packaging they were made of, if they were made from cigarette packs, credit cards or bar coasters (but not beer cans). While I don’t question the need, I wonder if the artists were warned not to use such products, and why the projects were used if they ignored the warning.

But overall the ideas in Eco Books are fun, inspiring and instructive, whether practical or not, and I have plenty of bookmarks in it to remind myself of materials I’d like to recycle, and binding methods I want to try.