craftgrrl | Adventures in Bookbinding!

Last night I made a journal for myself, using the instructions from this tutorial.

(Sorry about the grainy quality on this last one - my camera doesn't always like to cooperate.)

I'm really proud of the way this turned out. The only mistake I made was making the binding just a touch too narrow. You can see in the first photo how the binding curves in and stretches across the back of the book instead of creating a neat, straight spine. I'm just happy the book still closes and isn't ripping apart when I flip the pages.

I bought all my supplies at Michael's. I couldn't find any boxboard, so I grabbed some of the heavy cardboard backing from watercolor paper pads, and wrapped those with scrap-booking cardstock for the covers. Both the inside pages and the endpapers are regular 24lb multipurpose paper (the kind you use for printing paper), and I couldn't find binding thread either so I ended up using cotton crochet thread.

If anyone else does bookbinding, I was wondering if you have any tips for beginners? Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. Also, would it be possible to have the covers and the binding be one continuous piece? I'm assuming it's not a big deal, but my boyfriend thinks I should check to make sure I don't end up with a falling-apart mess.