Handmade Bookbinding: Soft Cover Long Stitch
with Kelly Lee Webeck
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Course Description
Sketchbooks are versatile and essential tools for an artist’s practice. Creating your own handmade book can deepen your connection to the creative process, making them significant in your artistic journey. Photographer and visual arts educator, Kelly Webeck, has maintained a sketchbook practice throughout her career. She uses them as a source of inspiration, to plan photoshoots, find relationships between images, and explore mediums beyond photography in experimental and expressive ways. She writes extensively and honestly in these creative journals about her life and dreams, often sourcing text for artist statements, grants, and other documents from these writings.
In this comprehensive online workshop, Kelly focuses on one important part of the sketchbook-making process—binding its important pages together. Over two Saturdays in November, Kelly introduces the basics of bookbinding and then the participants complete the workshop with a self-made softcover sketchbook. Throughout, Kelly shares her expertise in bookmaking, along with tips and tricks she has learned over the past 10+ years. She introduces participants to the variety of materials needed to bind a book and demonstrates how to bind a softcover sketchbook using a variation of the long stitch. Kelly also shares examples from her own library of handmade books, showing ways to customize them based on cover materials and paper choices. These books serve as creative examples throughout the workshop
In the first session, Kelly introduces the essential bookbinding tools and materials, ensuring participants know how to use them safely. She covers professional best practices and shares tips for working with alternative materials. Participants are provided a materials list before the first session and then learn how to use them to put together a book. Kelly provides clear instructions for what needs to be ready for the second session.
On the second Saturday, the group binds their books together. Participants watch Kelly’s tabletop camera as she demonstrates the stitching, with a view of her hands and a printable handout with step-by-step instructions. Knowing how to bind your own books allows you to customize them with different types of paper, test prints, and photographs. While the books we bind are blank, this sewing technique is an essential skill to master for future artist books filled with photographs and other creative personalization.
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
What You Should Know:
The workshop is open to all who have an interest in making sketchbooks, artist books, and journals. No level of photographic technical ability is required since this is not a workshop to make new images. A list of materials is provided to all registered.
Policies:
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
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about
Kelly Lee Webeck is a photographer and visual arts educator based in Berlin, Germany. She received her BFA in visual art studies from the University of Texas at Austin and her MFA in photography from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her photographic research is about Holocaust history, memory, and education. During her graduate studies, she spent one year on fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin to research Holocaust landscapes and memorial sites. During this time, she photographed the city and beyond, falling in love with the quality of light, the energy, the grit, and the thriving photographic community. She connects deeply with Berlin and is thrilled to share the city as an immersive, energetic backdrop to teach in.
As an artist, she is interested in bookbinding, analogue photography, and the use of vernacular photography in contemporary practices. She teaches visual arts at an international school in Berlin and teaches courses online related to contemporary photographic practices as well as Sketchbook Practices for Photographers. She has maintained a sketchbook practice that supports her photography for more than 15 years.
Instagram: @rocketfacedweeb
