I’ve been experimenting with making book cloth this week. Making the wheat paste was easy (there are plenty of recipies on the web). The first book cloth making instructions I followed were these, which have you cover the back of the cloth with paste, lay down the tissue paper, then add another layer of paste. I tried this on a piece of light cotton and a strip of denim. After leaving it overnight to dry I found that the paste had come through the cotton and created shiny marks. I had wondered why it was that you could make book cloth this way, when the whole reason for glueing paper on the back of fabric was to stop glue coming through to the front and creating – you guessed it – shiny marks. However, the denim was fine, so this method is probably fine for thicker fabrics (and what I suspect the author of the tutorial was using).

So I went looking for another tutorial and found this. I tried it out at lunchtime and within an hour (with the air con on) it was dry, with no shiny marks on the front. Success!

The next challenge was to try a larger piece. I needed a bigger waterproof surface to work on, and these boards covered in Contact that used to be the sides of an old homemade art folio were perfect for the job. The new instructions have you put the tissue paper down first…

… then paint it with paste…

… and then lay down the fabric and gently smooth.

However, I found that the tissue paper tended to expand when wet and formed wrinkles. Those wrinkles created a rippled effect on the surface of the fabric. So I tried again, this time applying the glue from the centre and gradually working outwards. It was much slower, but I got very few wrinkles.

That wasn’t the last of my experiments, however. I tried the first instructions again, changing the surface I worked on and using less glue, and still got shiny marks. I also tried the second method on thicker fabric, and while the tissue paper has adhered it doesn’t seem as secure as it is on the thinner cloth. So perhaps the first method is actually better for thicker fabrics. I will definitely be testing any fabric too different from plain light cotton before I jump in and make book cloth from it.

And I’m going to try using the pieces I’ve made on some test books before turning the pile of fabric I’ve gathered into book cloth. If they don’t work after all, I could have a pile of useless fabric instead.