Stick-bound Envelope Book

Posted by Scraps

Start with your evelopes. Number doesn’t matter, just make sure all of your evelope openings are oriented towards the right so you can get to them. It’s best to decorate them before you bind them, at least the backgrounds. Embellishments that will add bulk can be added after the fact.

In addtion to your stack of envelopes you will need a hole punch, a stick of some sort (I used a chop stick here, you could use a twig, a metal rod, or anything that is long enough to stretch along the length of the spine) and fiber or a long elastic band.

 

Punch your holes all the way through the stack of envelopes (I love my Japanese book drill for this). I added a strip of cardstock an inch wide to the edge of the envelope stack both as decoration but also as a sort of reinforcement for the binding. It’s an optional step, but suggested.

Start at the top hole, leave a long tail and thread from the front to the back, go along the back of the envelope stack, and come out through the bottom hole. Line up the chopstick along the punched holes and stich over the stick, going back into the bottom hole, along the back, and come out the top hole.

  

You should have both the starting tail and the end of your fiber coming out on either side of the stick. Tie a strong knot to secure the top of the stick. You can either trim the ends then or, as I did (and this is the reason for the long tails) wrap the fiber around and along the length of the stick to be decorative and secure it on the outside of the bottom loop. 

 

To do this binding with an elastic band you would simply loop one end of the band across one end of the stick, thread it through one hole, around the back, through the other hole and then slip the end loop around the other end of the stick.

The last picture is a shot of the openings of the envelopes as I did them. I slipped a piece of paper under the edge of the opening and then stamped along the openings to create a border around the pockets. I also flipped some of the envelopes so some pockets faced each other while others faced ‘whole’ pages (the backs of the envelopes).