The trouble with book cloth is that it’s sold by the yard, and since I usually do quarter-cloth bindings (where the spine is covered in cloth and the rest of the cover is paper), and I’ve bought many colors over the years to go with the different Japanese papers, I have a lot of it. And it’s kind of a pain to store — I roll it and store it on the bottom shelf of my flat-file storage, but sometimes it gets squashed or damaged, and then it’s all rolly and flippy when I try to use it. Drives me nuts!

As part of my last Discardia I did a big cleanup of my bookbinding materials, and that included flattening out all my rolls of book cloth and cutting it down to manageable sizes that could be stored flat. Since most of my books are roughly the same size (25″ by 38″ sheets of paper folded down to 6-1/4″ by 9-1/2″ sections) and the cloth to cover is usually 11″, I cut all the cloth to that height. I cut most of my cover papers down to that as well, so now when I want to make a book I can just pick out the materials and not wrestle with large sheets.

Once everything was cut, I decided to make a few full cloth books to use up some of of the colors I don’t use often. I don’t even remember why I bought this green, and apparently I didn’t use it much because I have a lot — I don’t generally do green. But on its own I kind of like it. It’s Iris bookcloth from Talas in Olive, a rayon, and has a pleasant texture. This book has 160 pages of 100lb Mohawk Superfine, so it’s got some heft to it.