Sewing Structures with Jennie Hinchcliff

To start off my spring break I signed up for another class at the SFCB. For those interested in exposed nonadhesive bindings, the Herringbone and French Twist are beautiful ways to create bindings for art journals or notebooks. I was able to come away from the class with two complete books and some beautiful marbled paper. Jennie Hinchcliff, who teaches Book Arts at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco, was a wonderful teacher and explained things very clearly.



I enjoyed the Herringbone very much once I got into the groove of the structure, although I choose thread that wasn’t already waxed and had some trouble getting the beeswax evened out consistently through the thread. There was way too much knotting and twisting going on and I found myself having to stop and untangle the thread often. You can see on the spine all the frayed edges of the thread, but I enjoyed the results very much.



The French Twist I had more trouble with due to the thread I choose being two ply. I had to add quite a few twist to each gathering to see the structure appear evenly across the thread. You can see as I went along I added more and more twists so the spine looks a bit off, but I really enjoyed the challenge and already cut more paper to practice.

I want to take these structures and actually apply them in a case binding situation to see if they would help the swell of the spine. They both lay pretty flat as small notebooks, but I need to increase the page size to see what the results would be. I don’t think the French Twist structure would help much with the swell due to the increased amount of thread you use to decorate around the running stitch, but it's time to experiment!