Coptic Stitched Books

I want to share with you today a couple of coptic bindings that we explored in the Intermediate Handmade Books class I taught at the beginning of the summer.

The first book is sewn with a 3-hole paired coptic stitch. The 3 holes are the 3 sewing stations, 2 on the front cover and 1 in the edge of the spine. And unlike the more common coptic binding that uses 1 needle and a continuous piece of thread, this ‘paired needle’ version uses uses 2 needles and 1 piece of thread for each set of sewing stations. In this case there were 2 sets of sewing stations, so it was sewn with 4 needles and 2 pieces of thread.

I find this type of coptic binding to be more secure than the more common coptic binding that wraps around the cover.

The second type of binding is the Single Sheet Coptic which contains sheets of paper (or other materials, such as wood, metal etc) instead of folded signatures. This is a great book for presenting original artwork or photographs or for binding unusual materials.

You can see that this thread wraps around the cover, unlike the first book where the thread went through the edge of the spine.

This is what the inside cover looks like:

If you’d like to learn how to do coptic bindings, check out my blog post 4 Awesome Coptic Binding Tutorials. If you want to share your latest coptic bound book, please leave a link in the comments!