A stitched zine

Last time I showed you how to make a cover for your zine of zines.  This time I'm going to make a stitched one.

I painted 5 pieces of A4 (letter) sized paper with watered down acrylic paint and put cling film on the top.  You could use watercolour paint instead.  If you use acrylic remember to take the cling film of before the paint dries completely.

Then I folded and cut the papers in the way I showed you in the first blog post on zines.  I glued the pages together in each zine and then sewed through the spine of each one.

First you find where the middle of the spine is on each zine, and make a hole with a big needle or a pokey tool.  Measure 3.5cms each side of the middle and make another hole

Take your threaded needle from the outside of the zine into the inside using the middle hole.

Take your needle from the inside to the outside through the top hole.  Make sure the end of the thread still hangs outside.

Take the needle to the bottom hole and into the inside.

Come back up through the centre hole with the two sets of threads either side of the long stitch.

Tie a knot in the two loose threads so that it holds the long stitch.

Make sure you pull the trheads tight before you tie the knot.  It should look like this

And NOT like this

Put all your threaded zines together.  Hold them together with an elastic band or bulldog clips.

Using another thread - I like to use variegated - start weaving in and out of the stitches on the spine.  Leave the end of the thread loose for now.

As you weave in and out use the needle to push the lines up tight to each other.  Don't pull the thread to tight at the sides as you want an even edge and width.

When you run out of thread, push the needle up the part you have already woven

Cut the thread off and start a new thread as you did in the beginning.

Work as closely as you can to the knots.

When you get to the base of the weaving take the thread up through the weaving and cut it off.  Where you started wach thread there will be tails.  Thread these into the weaving.

The woven spine.  You can leave the spine threads as they are, or cut them shorter or maybe add beads to them.

When you open the zines you will be able to see a bit of the weaving.

Next time we'll look at how we might use the zine.  Yes, I know I said that last time, but I got sidetracked by the weaving.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

A zine of zines

You can make each Zine as a standalone booklet and make the front page a cover.

Or you can make several Zines and put them together to make a zine of zines.   I made these for a blog challenge I was running called 12 Months in View.

I could have sewn each zine in the middlle and then connected them together by sewing the threads together or threading the thread through a spine.  I decided to use glue.

I glued the pages together in each zine that opened where they weren't supposed to.

I glued each zine to the next one.

The spine.

In my stash of bits worked on and too good to throw away I found a large tag that I had stenciled and stamped on.

I cut the end off and inked the edges on the back.  I scored the spine folds.

I glued the cover to the back and front of the zines but not to the spines.  I added some tissue tape to the back cover.

I added tissue tape to the front and used letters from my scrapbooking stash for the title.

I am really pleased with the end result.  I hope you like yours too.  Don't forget to share your end result with us all.

Next time we'll look at how we might use the zine.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Zine

Have you ever made a Zine?  Here's information on Zines in case you've never come across them before.

They are very easy to make and only need one sheet of paper. Here is a sequence of photographs to show you how to do it.  If you have never made one before, I suggest you get a piece of printer paper and make a practice one.

Take your piece of paper

 and fold it in half width ways.

 Open the paper out

 and fold the paper length ways.

 Open it out (landscape style)

 and fold the sides into the middle.

 Open it out and fold the paper in half as you did before and cut from the fold to the next fold.

 Open it out and stand it up like this.

Crease the folds again to close the zine up and bring the fold shown at the top of this picture to meet the fold at the left of the picture.

 Use a bone folder on all the folds to make them sit properly.  I then numbered the pages - outer for outside 'covers' and then 1 to 6.

 When you unfold it the numbering looks like this.

Now you've practised with a ppiece of plain paper you can try again with paper you've painted or with scrapbook paper.

I tried folding a 12"x12" piece of doublesided scrapbook paper and this was the result.

I tried out a piece of single sided cardstock with this result.

Here are the 3 together

This one I made with a painted paper.

Come back for the next part of the tutorial on Saturday.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice