Fixing my Sketch pad.

Well heres something out of the norm I thought Id never do. For a long while now I had been taking my sketch pad to work with me everyday, and as time has gone by its been wearing down untill finally sometime last month the spine had completely fallen off.

Distraught on how I didn't get to fill the book up with my random artwork and doodles, well mostly doodles lol. So after alot of thought I decided that I would attempt to fix it. The trick here was I didnt want to spend to much money on fixing it since I believe I didn't spend anymore than $15 on it. So after some research I found this nifty video/tutorial on how to repair the spine.

Helpful Vid link here!

To my excitement from what I saw on the video it looked like it wouldnt be that hard or that expensive to do, until I got to the part of what materials I needed. There were 2 little hurdles I had to jump,  1 the type of glue used in the vid and 2 the actual book cloth. The first one was solved with some digging around at my local Michaels. The video explained that I needed a mixture of PVA glue and Methyl Cellulose, problem is I couldnt find the Methyl Cellulose and the PVA glue that I found was really expensive, so the solution I found was a glue called Aleen's Acid free tacky glue, pretty much what the name implies its a acid free glue made for paper products and projects. The best part it was only like 4 bucks, more than half of what the PVA would of cost. The next hurdle was trying to find book cloth which wherever I looked I could not find. Again I didn't want to order it online since I didn't want to wait or the cost was alot more than what I had spent on the sketch pad. The solution was alot easier than I thought, browsing around doing research I stumbled upon yet again a youtube vid, gotta love youtube!

Helpful Vid link 2!

So from what the video explained there was this stuff that Walmart sells called Heat n Stick, which basically is used for iron on's for clothing and such. For another 5 bucks between the Heat n Stick and some tissue paper I finally had the means to make the book cloth. I really didn't take any in progress pics of process since it only really took me like 45mins to complete it. The first video I linked above pretty much explained the process on how I did it, about the only difference was that my sketchpad had this foe leather texture that I had to cut and scrape off to make room for the new spine, as you can see from the first pic. Thus finally after sitting overnight drying my sketch pad was reborn!

Theres a couple little flaws here and there like where I miscalculated the length of the cloth. Theres a small little gap where the cloth and the old foe leather meet, oh well tack that up as a learning experience. I would like to thank youtube authors Aranmade for the spine repair vid and Hoffbright for the book cloth vid, with out you guys I wouldn't be able to save my sketch pad. Till next post!