Just finished my third ever book binding, and the first one I’ve done in leather. This was my practice round before tackling the main project, which will be leather binding books 1-6 in the Dune series as a Christmas present. Apart from the paint job, do you see any details that could be improved?

Huge thank you to everyone who responded on my previous post! I feel a lot more prepared now and learned so much from doing this one, a lot of small mistakes I didn’t think about. 

- Like using pencil to mark the hair side of the leather, and then trying to erase it. 
- Using white handmade paper for the inside turned out see-through
- at first I used a piece of book board for the ridges on the spine, luckily I realized the problem before I glued it to the leather
- yeah so using acrylic markers wasn’t the shortcut I thought it was if I’m also wiping resolene on at the end. Airbrush all the way. 
- After gluing in the text block to the cover, I used plastic sheets as moisture barriers, but the plastic was too long so I folded them over onto the cover and then put it in the book press. Turns out even a thin slice of plastic can and did leave an impression in the leather. Ugh. 

Still, I’m super happy with my progress and can’t believe how much you can learn on the internet in just a couple months. Here’s hoping the Big Project improves on this one. 

First leather rebind finished