This book binding kit is a past box from Craftiosity’s craft kit subscription. It’s no longer available to buy on their website, although they do keep a few of their most recent boxes for sale as one-off purchases. I’ve always wanted to have a go at book binding. It’s not a skill I foresee myself using on a regular basis, but it was a fun thing to learn.

Included in the kit was:

• Faux leather paper
• Notebook pages
• Pre-printed notebook inserts
• Embroidery thread
• Awl
• Needle

I’ve never used faux leather paper before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect from it. I just followed the instructions included in the box and put my faith in them that it would all turn out ok! You had to wet the paper and then scrunch it up to create that crinkly leather effect and leave it to dry completely before it could be used. The overall work time on this project was only a couple of hours, but I left my faux leather paper to dry overnight so that’s definitely something to factor in when using this material.

Each of the notebook pages, pre-printed inserts, and the faux leather paper cover had to be pierced with the awl to create holes for the thread to be sewn through. This involved some careful measuring as these all had to line up with each other to ensure you didn’t end up with a wonky notebook.

Once the holes had been created then the notebook could be bound together. The pages were inserted in bundles with the pre-printed inserts at the front and back. The stitching itself was straightforward but the tricky part was keeping the pages lined up so the holes matched and you didn’t accidentally poke an extra hole where it wasn’t wanted!

There was the option to stitch onto the front cover as well, but I decided to leave mine blank as I preferred how it looked. This was a very satisfying project to make and resulted in something that would make a lovely gift for someone, if you could resist using it yourself!