etal foil is an exciting alternative to the traditional covering materials used in books.

Your book covers will be built with an outer layer of patinated copper foil wrapped around a core board. This foil-wrapped core is then adhered to a carrier board that is designed with a spine wire for attachment to the text block. In and of itself, utilizing the concept of a carrier board is worth participation in this workshop.

The structure that we’ll investigate has a non-adhesive spine system that uses an interior wire along the inside fold (gutter) of each signature of pages. Openings punched through the signature folds expose the wire, and allow you to use thread to anchor one signature to the next—thereby creating a text block. As noted above, covers will be adhered to a carrier board utilizing a spine edge wire for attachment to the text block.

Learn how to evaluate the appropriateness of metal as a possible substitute for paper, cloth, or leather. Also, explore the decoration of metals—including brass, copper, silver, lead, iron, tin, and aluminum—by examining many examples that have been patinated using chemical and/or heat treatments, debossed, sandblasted, cut, drilled, incised or abraded.

You can expect to (1) become acquainted with metals, (2) learn an interesting wire edge structure, and (3) complete the binding shown here.

(This workshop is not currently on the schedule. You may to request that we offer it sometime in the future.)