Since taking up bookbinding as a hobby, I’ve always wanted to make a little pendant book like the ones I’ve seen on bookbinder’s blogs and Etsy. So recently I gave it a go:

It’s about 2cm tall. Using leather and a longstitch binding (with waxed embroidery thread) made it a pretty quick and easy project, so I got to thinking… could I make a bunch of these as gifts to give people while I was overseas? And maybe for the house sitter?

So after a bit of shopping for a few colours of embroidery thread and beads that I didn’t have, I got cutting and stitching. I made them in five colours, burgundy, red, purple, blue and green:

And because I couldn’t find any gold chains at short notice, I bought cotton braid and used that to make necklaces:

And just in case the recipient was male and I’d run out of sock bookmarks, I made a few out of tougher leather and put a key ring on them:

They were a lot of fun to make, and my prototype has had plenty of admirers. Even the male doctor I saw was fascinated by it.