How to Sew a Book for Book Binding: Part Two

Video Transcript

"Now let's continue threading the string through the book. What I am going to do now after we thread it through the first 2 holes, I am going to make a knot. Not everybody does it like this but I like to do it because it gives me a nice anchor. As I thread it, I know that it will remain tight. I can pull the string very tight and there won't be any slack. So what I am going to do now is I am going to make just a regular knot and when I make it, I don't want to keep it in the middle I want to push it down toward the direction I am going to be sewing. So we see here is my first hole and here is my second hole and I am going to be sewing down this way. So what I am going to do is make the knot. I am going to push it down so that it falls on to that side of the hole that is further down. I am going to try and really really make it as tight as possible and I am going to keep my finger there and swing around again always pressing down to bring my finger there. If you are working with your assistant it is a good job for him or her to put his finger down and just close them out and make it as tight as you can. Make sure the book is lined up so that you can find the hole easily and it goes through. Now I've basically made my first run. Now I am going to work my way back to the top so I can make my knot and it also gives us a full line. You see here if I don't make my way back we don't have any string here because each side is going to missing one side of string on where we came out. So now we make our way back and because of that knot I can pull it nice and tight because I am anchored over there. So I can pull it really nice and tight and I can go ahead and start making my way back. Now we see that we took the needle off, we don't need that any more and we can just pull the string that we just took out. We can pull it nice and tight. Again is our knot that we first made so we are nice and anchored. We pull it as nice and tight as we can so that the strings are again giving a nice strong support. Now once we do that, we feel that it is nice and tight we go ahead and we take the excess string that was left over and we make another knot right on top of the one that we had before and that is pretty good, pretty nice strong binding there. We'll see when we open up the book, we'll see that it is nice. You can't really see the strings if you open up the book, unless you open up really really wide. You can see where we put the string but you see that the book still opens up really nice since it is not very hard to open."