Quite honestly, making your own decos can be as simple or as complex as you'd like it to be. Some people literally just staple together a couple sheets of paper, glue-stick a magazine picture to the front and a label to the inside cover, and call it a deco. (And it is...it's just not one I'd want to get! LOL!) By contrast, there's some creatives out there who have turned this hobby into an art form in its own right. It's all up to you.
One thing you can do to get started is make some forms, so that when the whim strikes you, you can make decos At Will. This is what I did when I started. I made about fifty small booklets with blank covers, using standard card stock and neutral sheets of paper inside. (It's generally said, too, that a deco with between six to eight pages inside, total, is the best bet to make sure they're returned....) It was as easy as cutting strips about 2 1/2" wide from both the stock and the paper, and stapling them in the middle. I'm still using those forms when there's something I want to make that just requires a booklet to put it on, rather than some different form of binding.
My big thing now is to play with materials and form. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't -- but it's giving me a chance to use a lot of my bookbinding experience, and it makes for some really neat decos, too.
Below, you'll find a list of bindings. Each will (eventually) take you to a page that will show you how to do that binding for your own books. These techniques are applicable for both decos AND other kinds of artist's books, though I may or may not have tried them on both kinds of binding. I'm hoping to get some pictures of the process for you, too, so you can see how it's all done.
- BASIC STAPLED BINDING/COVERED
- JAPANESE STAB-BOUND
- TWO TYPES OF WIRE BINDING
- TIED BINDINGS
- GLUED BINDING
- ALTERNATIVE MATERIAL BINDING (FOAM, ETC.)
- ACCORDIAN FOLD BOOKS
- SINGLE SHEET BOOKS
- TAG BOOKS (TWO TYPES)
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