sgraffito |sgraˈfiːtəʊ|
noun ( pl. -ti |-ti|)
literally ‘scratched away’; a form of decoration made by scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting color, typically done in plaster or stucco on walls, or in slip on ceramics before firing.

This technique is pretty much like scraperboard work…or those oil pastel drawings you made in primary school art class that you covered with a thick black poster paint, and then scraped back to reveal the colors…with the advantage of being fully smudge and waterproof once dry, because you only use acrylic paints, which makes it a great technique for the art journal.

Start by painting your page with the background colors. You can paint it solidly in one color of acrylics, as I hurriedly did today for this post, or you can execute an actual design—shapes, letters, whatever—in blocks of solid color.

N.B. Remember that when you cover the background with another color to start the sgraffito, the background color will only be seen in the lines you have scratched out. So if you want a pink lily, for example, with fine black lines, you would paint a black lily, first, and then cover it all up with a very opaque pink, and then scratch lines to reveal the black underneath.
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When the acrylic is dry, give the page a single coat of gloss or semi-gloss acrylic medium. This seals one color from the next, keeping the layers of different colors from sticking to each other, and so keeps the colors and lines distinct.

Let the coat dry.
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Take the color of your next layer, and mix it with retarder medium. Don’t use any water, just the medium, and try to use a paint to medium ratio of 2:1…too much retarder medium and your paint will take forever to dry. Also, it will sit in a wet puddle that is no good for scratching because every time you draw a line through it the wet paint will simply flow in to fill the line again. You want the paint smooth but not runny.
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Fill in the shape, or letters, or whatever that you’ve drawn. Don’t do the whole page at once…remember that even with retarder, the thin film of paint will start to dry, and if the shape is so big that it takes you a long time to scratch your designs into it, parts of it may be dry before you get to them. Scratching only really works if the paint is still wet. I work on patches the size of a playing card, scrape my lines into it, then paint the next patch, scrape into that, and so on.

I didn’t have a design planned,so I just kind of doodled this rather underwhelming shape: yet another tentacled creature…every time I try to paint something spontaneously I end up with tentacles. Damn limited imagination. Anyway.
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Experiment with scratching tools. From top to bottom are a thin brass rod, a sculpting tool with a soft rubber cone on the tip (I think polymer clay artists use these things?), and the wrong end of a thin paintbrush. Personally I find the rubber-tipped tool too yielding…the very end of the cone tends to wiggle, but you may like that. I prefer the metal rod and the paintbrush…firm sticks that draw consistent lines, each of a definite weight. Find what you like.
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Keep a wad of tissue in your other hand, and start scratching your design into the wet paint. Every inch or so, wipe the tip of your tool off on the tissue paper, as a glob of wet paint will collect there. The term “scratching” here isn’t quite accurate…it implies more force than necessary. There’s no need to bear down or tear the paint and paper beneath. If the paint hasn’t dried yet, it’s like drawing in butter. If the paint has dried, you can still revive it with a tiny dab of retarder from a small brush. Spread that dab of retarder around the dry area, wait a few seconds, and try again.
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The rounded tip of a paintbrush makes good dots…hold the brush vertically and rotate the handle between your fingers, rather than try and ‘gouge’ the dot out from one direction. It makes nice round dimples (albeit small ones)
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If you have made your paint too wet and runny—with either water or retarder—you will know it right away, because the paint will form wet patches, and scratching into it will not leave behind a clean path, but the liquid paint will creep back into the lines you scratched, which is what happened in this toxic green speech bubble I painted next. Wait a bit for the paint to dry a little bit or, if you used too much retarder and it looks like the paint won’t dry for hours, blot it up with paper towel, maybe a slightly moistened one (the acrylic gloss medium will protect the background layer) and paint the shape in again with the right consistency of paint.
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And that’s it. Nothing special, really, but it produces a nice effect of its own, distinct from painting fine lines onto a background with a brush or mapping pen. It was often used by the old masters in their oil paintings to hint at, without actually detailing, the intricate lines of lacework or leafy shrubbery. It allows your drawn line to variegate from color to color, too…just paint the background with rainbows or whatever, before covering up and scratching through.

I wish I’d given more thought to what I was going to draw for this post…this tentacled thing has turned out pretty fugly. Hopefully you see the potential of the technique without being pot off by Squid Ugly, here.
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SO why shouldn’t you just take a pair of scissors and hack off all the excess fabric that sticks out behind your wooden embroidery hoop?

Because it looks like a butcher did the job with a cleaver. Because a hooped embroidery always loses tension over time, and goes saggy, and if the embroidery goes saggy, you can’t stretch it taut. Because you can’t undo the hoop to clean the embroidery, as you’ll never be able to get the fabric back into the hoop. Because if the edges of the embroidery ever fray, they may come dangerously close to showing on the front of the piece. Because you can’t later change your mind and move the embroidery to a bigger hoop, or make something different out of it, when it’s been cropped so close. Because you’ve gone to all this trouble to stitch something nice, it’s a shame to rush through the finishing steps like a knucklehead. Because you are not a knucklehead.

⓵ Trim the fabric outside the hoop into a circular shape, but not very close to the hoop. I gave this embroidery a 2 ½-inch margin, and I’d say that’s the narrowest margin I’m comfortable with.

On the other hand, the maximum fabric margin you can leave is the measurement from the center of the circle to the hoop’s edge. That is, half your hoop’s diameter. So if your hoop is 8 inches across, the maximum fabric margin you can leave on is 4 inches.

☆ For a really finished look, you can opt to now blanket-stitch, machine overlock or  finish this raw fabric edge with a wide zigzag machine stitch. I didn’t have time, at this point, but I can still choose to finish the raw edge of my embroidery later. Needless to say, hat’s one advantage of finishing an embroidery this way.

⓶ Thread some strong thread into a sharp needle—toning to match the fabric if you wish—and make a temporary (removable) knot at the end. Now sew a running stitch all around the fabric circle. Stay about ¼-inch (around 10 mm.) in from the edge of the fabric. My running stitches are about ¼-inch long, too.

Sew full circle until you find yourself back at the starting knot.

You can take the needle off the thread’s end, now, and undo the temporary knot. The framed embroidery will look something like this:

Now pick up both thread ends and gently start pulling the excess fabric together. It will ruffle and pucker like this. Use your free hand to ease the fabric along the thread, aiming to get the ruffles evenly spaced and sized, all around the hoop.

When done gently and properly, the ruffles will come toward the center of the back of the embroidery, and lay reasonably flat, like this:

Finish off by tying an overhand knot, and then a small, simple bow, as for shoelaces. This way, the knot is easy to undo and the embroidery can be removed for washing. You can leave the gathering stitches in when washing or working on the embroidery… just gently slide the fabric until the ruffles open up and your embroidery lays flat.

Another good tutorial, by Cheryl C. Fall,  for hooping and finishing an embroidery to display is here. The reason I don’t use her method is that I would have to undo all those tiny slip-stitches around the back of the embroidery before I could do something as simple as adjust the tension in the fabric, or remove the embroidery for cleaning.

But it looks much neater than my method. Either way, it beats taking a pair of scissors and giving your embroidery a close, ugly shave. Looks much more professional, too, if you are interested in selling your work.

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Ideas. Sometimes there are so many ideas that it’s hard to decide what to start on first, or which ones to include and which to leave out. Sometimes I need a wild card, a random way of decision-making that will, paradoxically, introduce restrictions and parameters to my ideas. And sometimes I need to exercise my mind’s ability to mix the ideas up, to take two or more qualities and hybridize them. To give birth to monsters and mongrels.

I keep a plastic bag full of words written on little strips of paper.

What sort of words?

Nouns, mainly…only things that have personal significance to me, and that I have—at an earlier point—thought, “I’d like to draw that someday.” So no trawling the internet for trendy words. No reading other people’s blogs, or leafing through magazines, looking for whatever’s in vogue. No adding the word “polaroid camera” to the bag, when I have never owned, used, nor even held one before. No fake nostalgia and enthusiasm for things I cannot honestly say have been part of my life until now.

“Personal Significance” is my watchword, here. Things I care about, or despise, or fear, or admire; things I know a little about, or have always been infinitely curious about. Passions. Activities I actually engage in. Events I’ve experienced. Objects that are symbolic to me, or to my life. Anyway, you get what I mean.

Also, adjectives…a color, or color combination, that I want to play with. Textures or patterns that I love to look at, or love to draw, or would like to draw more of. Or my feelings:

Avocado green. Chocolate and seashell pink. Swamp green. Hairy. Crackled. Fat. Bundled. Aged. Exuberant. Embarassed. Dripping.

Much less common, but making an appearance once in a while, are verbs…Smoking. Scream. Bite. Cycling. To fly. To melt.

I write them down on the little strips of paper. Not everything all at once…I let the words appear naturally, as life unfolds, and add them to the bag when I think of them. More often I cull the slips, throwing some away when I feel that what I wrote was too influenced by something I saw, or heard, or had come across elsewhere…the ones that strike a false or pretentious note, a mainstream hipster vibe, and that don’t actually stand up to the simple questions “Is this really me? Is this important to me? What do I know of this?”

To do the exercise, I pull two or three slips out of the bag. I don’t make any special effort to pick one each from the nouns, adjectives, and verbs…I simply pull two slips out, and if the combination seems a little thin, I pull one more, and it usually introduces enough disturbance to birth an image.

Then, scribbling in a small sketchbook, I try to combine those words…naturally, the easiest and laziest ideas come first: tired clichés, popular depictions, cute arrangements that are influenced by what I have seen elsewhere. As soon as I realize that something is vaguely familiar or commonplace, I flip a page and try again…the push being to come up with something beyond what I know. Beyond comfort zones, or at least beyond what I am aware exists already. I try to come up with a little bit of difference.

I roughly scribble five, six, seven thumbnails…very approximate, very rough. When I feel like one of the thumbnails is onto something, I work it onto a page of my visual journal…still very rough, but with at least the basics of composition, and an idea of colors, if there are to be colors.

I don’t consider these exercises to be ‘art’ in any grand sense. They are, still, really just exercises, and because of the random way the images are put together, they often tend to be silly. Maybe one in twenty of these drawings will call out to be treated more seriously, will deserve to go into a painting, or an embroidery, or whatever.

Most of the time, though, they stay in my sketchbooks.

But the imaginative work that the mind does, while performing these exercises, is the more lasting reward. If you keep pushing beyond what comes to you easily, and tell the mind, “You can do better than that,” it often does. It grows more flexible, and more playful.

This isn’t about teaching you how to draw, although I tend to learn a little about how to draw when I do these exercises, for the simple reason that I may have to look up a picture of traffic lights to see how one is built, or study an anatomy book to see how a human body is put together. It all adds up. A little bit of effort goes a long way.

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You will need:

• thin cardboard strip, 11 cm x 2 cm
• felt (your choice flavor) strip, 12 cm x 4 cm
• things to decorate your felt with: embroidery, yarn, beads, crayons or pastels, sequins, paint, lace, whatever.
• masking tape
• craft or hot glue
• needle and thread (2 strands embroidery, or 1 strand of stronger thread)
• a tailor’s awl
• hang cord or ribbon (optional)
• large needle with big eye (only if attaching hang cord)

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• the fluoro orange nail polish…an experiment that I won’t repeat! Gah!
• the harsh red lettering…especially in the first photos, where I was writing by hand with a crayon on the table.
• the terrible yellowy color-cast these photos have

You will need:

• Paper
• cardboard
• scissors
• quilt batting
• craft glue
• a toning shade of embroidery floss
• a sharp needle
• possibly a thimble
• a large sharp needle or an awl
• a padded surface to do the awl punching on

Uh, please ignore the strip of card for the moment, that’s for Part 2…*doh!*

It’s just the circles for this part.

Huh? Where did my text go? Anyway, it’s pretty clear here: work a running stitch all round the edge of the felt circle.

You will need:

• paper large enough to wrap your present in…I used Canson Mi-Tientes in bright red.
• masking tape…I used 1-inch wide masking tape.
• Metallic acrylic paints…I used Lumiere® by Jacquard, Folk Art® by Plaid, and Atelier® Interactive™ metallic acrylic paints
• pencil and cartridge paper
• Removable adhesive
• x-acto knife or other sharp scalpel.
• black card..I used black Optix in cover weight…and a contrasting color of card for the center of the medallion…I used Japanese paper in gold momigami
• glue or paste

Start with the masking tape…easier done when the paper is lying flat, obviously, but I didn’t know what I was going to do until I’d wrapped the parcel, so I did my masking around the object…

Painted the paper with metallic paints. I used gold, pink, copper and pearl metallic paints…brushed on, no thinning with water, but spreading the paint thinly. Let dry.

Carefully remove the masking tape. Again, up to this point I could have done everything on a flat piece of paper, and it would have made my life easier. I worked slowly, removing the tape, trying not to tear the paper. I still managed to get a little tear right on the front of the parcel. Doh!

On a piece of plain paper, draw the main medallion and the ribbons. Split the elements up into distinct shapes that can be cut from black paper later. Leave little gaps between the elements, to accentuate the fact that the design is made from cut paper.

I used removable (also known as re-positionable) adhesive to stick the drawing down to black card, and an X-acto knife to cut the shapes out. When all the pieces are cut out, you can peel the white drawing paper away cleanly from the black card.

To raise the medallion away from the surface of the paper I stuck a circle of foam core—cut smaller than the medallion—to the back of the medallion. I cut a second, smaller medallion out of Japanese gold momigami paper, and centered that on top of the black medallion. When I had positioned and glued the medallion down to the present, I arranged the ribbon pieces around it, and glued those down directly to the red giftwrap paper.

Just something quick that you can do when you’re in a pinch and need to wrap up a present, so that it still looks nice.

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Nothing says “Fiesta!” like colorful bunting flags hanging all over town…

Another quick way to use up fabric scraps. I dreamt these tiny stringable fabric bunting flags up just before falling asleep last night, and spent a quick hour this morning making some, to see if the idea would work. The sort of thing you can make using junk from around your home…I found everything I needed just rummaging through my “crafting junk” boxes.

Can be made with colorful scrapbook paper, too, as decor, though I don’t know if I’d wear paper bunting—wouldn’t look good for very long, and the sharp points might be irritating to the skin.

Materials:

• double-sided sticky tape
• a piece of wax paper or non-stick baking parchment
• fabric scissors, a ruler, and a permanent marker
• skinny plastic tubing…straws, hollow lollipop sticks, that sort of thing. For this project all I could find were some hollow plastic balloon sticks…they were a bit thick to cut through with scissors, though not impossible. They don’t have to be that thick or hard, though. Skinny drinking straws would be ideal.
• a piece of necklace cord of your choice…so long as it fits into the hollow plastic tubing
• beads (optional)

Cut a length of double-sided tape and place it on the sheet of wax paper or baking parchment.

Using the marker, draw a triangle on the tape’s backing paper. Center the flag’s point (roughly) and run the two diagonal lines all the way to the edges of the tape. You can making the bunting triangle as short (squat) or long (narrow) as you like. The marker ink doesn’t stick very well to the tape’s waxy backing paper…it’s okay, you just need an approximate idea, anyway.

Measure the length of that first flag, and mark out the rest of the tape to the same length…that is if you want uniform-sized flags. You might want to go for a wonky, uneven bunting, in which case, measure out whatever different lengths you wish.

Cut the tape up along your drawn lines, keep the pieces on the baking parchment for easy access later.

Take one piece of tape and stick it to the wrong side of your fabric scrap.

Fold the fabric—the end with tape on it—over so that the fold lies right along one short edge of the tape.

Cutting through both layers of fabric at the same time, trim the fabric scrap right up to the other three sides of the tape. Don’t trim the edge where the fabric is folded.

Here’s your little rectangle of fabric, now, with tape over half of it.

Peel back the tape’s backing paper.

Lay your plastic tubing on top of the fold line, with the tip of your tubing going all the way to the edge of the fabric rectangle.

If you centered the tubing properly, part of it will touch the double-sided tape, and you can now pick the tubing up in one hand, and wrap the two fabric flaps around the tubing.

Try to make sure the two flaps of fabric line up edge-to-edge…especially the far side of the flag, opposite the tubing. If the left and right sides don’t match perfectly it’s not a big deal, you’ll be cutting those sides off, anyway.

I did a few more of these, side-by-side, on the same tube…

(Sorry about the inky fingers, I got the permanent marker, from the first steps, all over them!)

Using a strong pair of scissors or a craft knife, cut the fabric flags free. Try and cut the tubing right up to fabric, so the plastic doesn’t show.

Starting from the center where you want the sharp point of the flag to be, cut first to one side, and then to the other, on a diagonal that ends at the edge of the fabric, just before the tubing.

And now you have a little flag that you can thread onto some cord.

Alternate them with chunky, colorful beads, if you like.

Now you can go to the Fiesta!

I would very much love to see how you use these beads! If you try this tutorial, please post a pic of your finished work in the Comments section. Thanks!

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This is a favorite method of mine for putting together quick fabric patchwork pieces that I then use to cover my handbound books with.

It’s “low brow” because the fabric scraps are laid down with raw edges: I don’t turn the edges of the pieces over, or stitch one piece to the next with a neat ¼-inch seam. I don’t measure or use templates to cut the pieces out…I don’t even use fabric* as the foundation!

It is a great method to use if you plan to mount the patchwork to something hard and stable afterwards, as a purely decorative skin. Use the resulting fabric to cover a box, or medium density fibreboard (MDF) craft shapes…to cover book boards, or glue onto greeting cards. I’ve made postcards and artist’s trading cards (ATCs) with it, stitching or gluing the fabric to heavy paper.

This would not be a good method to use on a serious quilt, or any other free-moving sewing project. The patchwork won’t take washing, and probably wouldn’t hold together if the pieces were constantly moving and flexing. Certainly not suitable for upholstery, bags or anything that gets wear-and-tear…even if you backed it with fabric later, and quilted it all over for strength, the raw edges could slowly work themselves into rough, frilly edges.

*Note: before making my books I do add a fabric lining on the back…to cover all the stitching up, and to give stability and strength to the patchwork (because fusible interfacing is stretchy and weak.)

Want to give it a go? Here’s the how-to:

You will need

• medium to heavy-weight fusible interfacing
• loads of fabric scraps
• a pair of fabric scissors or shears
• an iron and hard surface to iron on
• baking parchment
• a sewing machine and different colored threads

1. Cut the fusible interfacing to the finished size you’d like your patchwork to be. Below, I have a small stack, all cut to the size I will need for covering my handmade journals.

2. Iron and cut your fabric into square and rectangle shapes…I don’t cut them smaller than 5 cm. (2 inches) square…bigger pieces can always be cut down later, as you work.

I don’t bother with rulers and cutting wheels, I just use scissors and “eye” it. I don’t like perfectly straight grids. A gentle curve here and there, a ‘not-quite-square’ square, looks quirky, fun, and more creative. Keep the OC levels low, it’s low-brow patchwork!

3. Lay the piece of interfacing on top of a clean sheet of paper, glue-side-up (the glue side has little shiny dots all over it); take a piece of fabric and lay it down wherever…you can start in the middle, or line your pieces up along all the edges, first. When you take the second piece of fabric, lay it down so it overlaps the first, just a bit…this is just to make sure the interfacing doesn’t peek through later, when you’re machine-stitching.

Just keep laying pieces of fabric down—playing with pattern, color, size or shape—until you get an arrangement you’re happy with.

4. This is almost done…just a few more of those bare interfacing areas to cover. Cut and shape the fabric as you work, and move slowly so that the pieces that are in place don’t move.

I make several of these arrangements at one time, each time laying the interfacing on top of a fresh sheet of paper, and moving the finished arrangements to one side of my workspace by moving the sheet of paper they are lying on…so as not to rearrange anything.

5. When I have covered all my interfacing pieces with scraps, I prepare my “ironing board”. I use a smooth plank of laminated shelving, with a sheet of baking parchment taped down to its surface. You can use a utility table top…a firm, smooth surface is better than a soft padded one.

Set your iron to cotton or linen. Take a sheet of paper with one ‘arrangement’ on it, and slide the fabric scrap arrangement gently off the paper, onto the ironing board.

6. Cover your patchwork with another sheet of baking parchment. Iron the patchwork so that it sticks to the fusible interfacing. Move slowly all over the piece, pushing down to force the fabric and the interfacing together. Take special care to iron all around the edges of the patchwork.

7. When you think the fabric pieces are stuck to the interfacing, remove the top sheet of baking parchment and quickly, lightly flip the piece over onto its face. Cover with the parchment again, and iron the back of the patchwork in same way you did the front.

The patchwork should have cohered enough to allow you to pick it up at one end and let it hang down…though it is by no means strong, as fusible interfacing is a very weak adhesive. There will still be bits of loose fabric that flip up…these are the areas where two or more pieces have overlapped, so some parts of the fabric didn’t come in contact with the melting glue of the interfacing.

8. Put a nice contrasting or toning color of thread in your sewing machine, pick a wide, decorative stitch pattern with a bit of satin stitch action going on, shorten the stitch length (if you have an old machine, like mine) so the fancy pattern isn’t stretched out, all wiry and vague, and go over all the edges of the fabric scraps.

I try to run down the center of two pieces, letting the stitch straddle and hold down both pieces at one pass.

Just follow the edges, making quarter-turns when you have to, cutting and starting somewhere else when you want to, and changing the color of your thread and the stitching pattern of your machine at least once! Make sure all the edges have been stitched down. I don’t do the outermost border of my pieces, because I will be bias-binding those later, but you can do an all-around frame for yours, depends what you want to use the patchwork for.

Here’s one finished patchwork piece…

And here’s what the stitching looks like, on the back. All that’s left to do is trim the overhanging bits of fabric, and then back the patchwork (you can stitch, glue, or fuse it down to fabric, paper, wood, etcetera…)

If you do give this cheater’s patchwork a try, I’d love to see how you used the finished piece…what else can be done with it that I haven’t tried yet? Heaps of ideas out there, I’m sure.

Have fun!

from left to right:

from left to right:

from left to right:

from left to right:

from left to right:

from left to right:

from left to right:

Most frequently used by bookbinders today, the Headband with a Bead on the Edge features a two-color stripey band with little ‘beads’ of alternating colors that sit right on top of the paper and just underneath the headband itself.

I’ve put together a photo how-to for sewing these. Tutorials do exist on the internet for these headbands, and I found a couple eventually, but it wasn’t easy, so I ended up buying a book on the subject; one more tutorial in cyberspace might just make it that little bit easier for people who want to learn.

I have an impish tendency to dismiss traditional materials and use what I like when making something, and so I did a whole bunch of these headbands recently using the same variegated DMC Perle #5 thread that my embroidery favors, and it seems I accidentally solved the question among more orthodox bookbinders of how to use more than two colours when making headbands. It is handy to be a jack of all crafts, sometimes…the things you know from one craft can cross-pollinate the others.

I learned this technique from the book Headbands: How To Work Them, by Jane Greenfield & Jenny Hille (Oak Knoll Press, 2008), and the only thing I have changed in their method is that I start my headband out with the knot on the outside of the text block, where it won’t be seen after the covers are put on.

Equipment & Materials:

• scissors
• a sharp needle large enough to take your thread
• a core of braided cord or leather. I use braided cord approximately 3mm (1/8 “) in diameter
• 2 colors of headband thread, 450-600mm (18″-24″) each (for these pictures I have used yellowy-green variegated DMC Cotton Perle #5, and white crochet thread of the same thickness.
• Clear nailpolish and/or PVA adhesive

Step 1

Tie the threads together with an overhand knot. The white thread will be our tying down thread (A), and the green thread will be the winding thread (B) Thread the green winding thread (B) into the needle.
(Please note: this is completely opposite to the instructions in the “Headbands…” book, but doing it this way will keep the knot on the outside of the signature, where it will never be seen)

Step 2

Open the first signature up to its centre and, from the outside, insert the needle (with green winding thread B) into the top hole you tied your kettle stitch in when you were binding the signatures together.

Step 3

Pull the green thread all the way into the middle of the signature, so the knot is pulled snugly up against the back of the signature. Take the needle off the green winding thread (B) and move it to the white tying down thread (A). Now we can go back to following the instructions from the book…

Step 4

Bring the needle (with the white thread) over the top the first signature, into the centre of that signature, and out at the same kettle-stitch hole we mentioned before. Pull most of the thread through, so that you have a small loop of the white tying down thread (A) formed on the first signature.

Step 5

Lay your short piece of core across the top of the book, slipping one end into the loop as shown. Tighten up the loop of white tying down thread (A) so that it firmly holds the core, but not so tight that the core is pulled off. Things are not very stable at this point, so work slowly and gently.

Step 6

Pick up the green winding thread B, slip it under the core to the right, around the back of the loop of white tying down thread A, under the core on the left, and back toward you.

This holds the white tying down thread A firmly. Here’s what it should look like from the fore-edge of the book.

Step 7

Bring the white tying down thread A up from the back of the book and toward you, laying it across the core neatly beside the first white winding. You now have two white (A) windings on the core. We’ll be working two windings of each color over the core.

Step 8

Now, to introduce the green winding thread B, bring it from the left of the book, across white tying down thread A, go under the core and toward the back of the book.

Pull the green thread B gently to form the first (green) bead directly underneath the two white windings.

Step 9

Bring the green winding thread B back toward you, laying it across the core neatly beside the white thread A windings. This forms your first green winding.

Step 10

Go around the core with the green winding thread B again, forming the second winding. Use a fingernail to push the two green thread B windings, so they sit right up next to the two white thread A windings.

Step 11

Bring the white tying down thread A from the left side of the book and lay it across the green winding thread B, go under the core and toward the back of the book.

This forms the second bead, a white one, directly underneath the two green windings.

Step 12

Bring the white tying down thread A over the top of the core. With the needle, go down into the center of the signature that is beside the previous green (B) winding, and push out of the top hole (kettle-stitch hole) to the back of the book. Pull the white tying down thread A firmly, making sure the winding lies snugly beside the previous green winding.

Step 13

Bring the white tying down thread A back toward you, across the core, to form the second white winding of the pair.

Continue, repeating Steps 8 to 13…

that is, bring the green winding thread B from the left side of the book, crossing over the white tying down thread A and going under the core to form a green bead… and so on…

Step 14

At the end of the book, make sure you finish up with the white tying down thread A…make only one winding, taking the needle down into the center of the last signature, and out the kettle stitch hole onto the back of the text block.
Remove the needle from the white tying down thread A, and put it on the green winding thread B. Take this thread down into the same signature and out the same kettle stitch hole.

On the back of the book, tie the two threads together using a square knot. Trim the tails.

Step 15

Cut the extra lengths of core using sharp scissors. Cut them flush with the beginning and ending of the windings. Be very careful not to cut the winding threads!

Put a dab of clear nail polish on the core ends to stop them fraying, as well as on the back of a few winding threads on each side, to prevent them coming undone.

Stick the tail ends of the winding threads down to the back of the text block.

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