on March 3, 2017This rainbow notebook with woven pipe cleaners is bound with coptic stitch
I made this rainbow notebook with woven pipe cleaners. The pipe cleaners make a colourful cover for this chunky, coptic stitch bound notebook.
We had loads of pipe cleaners left over from crafty activities at Christmas, so I decided to weave them together to make this colourful notebook. Here is how I did it:
Firstly I wove the pipe cleaners together to make two covers. I laid out some of the pipe cleaners parallel to each other (Mine were very long so I doubled them up) and then wove other pipe cleaners over and under, back and forth between them. I then weaved in and cut off all the ends to make two rectangles of the same size.
I wanted to use rainbow coloured paper to make a really bright, bold book. I found 6 bright colours to use, that went well with the vivid colours of the pipe cleaners.
My two pipe cleaner covers measured 15 x 11 cm, so I was able to use exactly A5 sheets (half of A4), folded in half to make my signatures.
I made 4 signatures of each colour, with 5 folded sheets in each. I arranged thee 24 signatures to make a rainbow, matching up with the red/pink/yellow cover on one side and blue/green/black/white cover on the other.
I sewed the signatures together using a coptic binding stitch.
Here is the final notebook. It is extremely chunky, which is kind of what I was going for, but I perhaps went a little overboard. This made it more difficult and long-winded to bind, so if I did it again, I would definitely use slightly fewer pages. But overall i’m pretty pleased with the result.
I love how the coptic stitch binding looks, and will be making more notebooks using this technique in the future. Stay tuned for a more in-depth tutorial!
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