Bookbinding Techniques

I'd like to share with you my experience with the courses I took this summer in Mexico City. The teacher was Susana Domínguez, from the workshop Códex in Madrid, Spain.

The first of the courses was "flying gold". It lasted for seven sessions, approximately 40 hours.

This is gold of 24k in extremely thin sheets. In this image you can see it after being cut.

We learnt how to gild edges, like they used to do centuries ago.

In this course they also taught us to gild using the gold leaf. Now, there are two methods: a traditional one that uses egg white and a modern one that uses something called "fixor". Using the white obviously has more complications, specially time related, but it has the perk of being cheaper and more common: everyone can get an egg, while fixor is quite expensive and only sold in Relma (Paris).
Anyway, below you will see a plaque of black leather: the right side of the plaque was gilded with the egg white and the left side with the fixor.

Some details of the left side, gilded with fixor:

Some images of the right side of the plaque, using the egg white.

Finally, we made some mosaique, that is, we cut out a piece of leather and we put a different one, then we gilded on top.

The second course was on "escartivanas". I didn't find a traduction on escartivanas; it's a style of binding which has the characteristic of opening very well. We didn't make a book, but we made models on the different types of escartivanas one can make. The course lasted approximately 10 hours.

The third course was on Contemporary Decoration Techniques. The course lasted for about 25 hours.We worked with pieces of leather and we were taught how to emboss an image, how to transfer an image onto the leather and how to dye a piece of leather, using alcohol inks, foil and acrylic.

We also had two plaques to work on. On the first one, we made mosaic border-to-border. The pieces I used were pieces of leather I had previously dyed.

On the second plaque, we practised incisions and applications.

Some images of the plaques made by my classmates.

I hope you found this post interesting and you enjoyed it. Comments or questions are welcome. Have a nice day!