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If you’re interested in learning how to make a historical wooden-board model from start to finish, then you can’t go wrong with Jim Croft’s intensive Old Ways class being held this summer. The tool intensive workshop runs from June 24 – June 25, and the bookmaking workshop goes from June 26-July 11. Here’s a list, taken from his website, of some of the things he’ll teach in the bookmaking class:
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Toolmaking and sharpening:
Two Days
- Elk & deer bone folders
- Locally gathered & cured wood awls
- Tool sharpening & maintenance
Fiber from stem to thread:
Two Days
- Learn to process local, imported, sorted, sordid, and recycled hemp & flax
- Also work with material taken from seed to thread and from fiber to rag or at least stalk to thread
- Linen fire hose processing
- Making lye from ash
- Wood-fired lye cooking, retting, braking & scutching,
- Hackling, spinning, plying & natural bleaching
- Hand-cutting fiber
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Papermaking:
Three Days
- Using hemp, flax, and cotton pulps
- Comparisons and contrasts of the beater
- Meeting the water-powered stamp mill
- Gelatin tub sizing and wet gelatin pressing
- Loft drying in spurs
- Hand burnishing
Bookmaking with Wooden Boards and Clasps:
Five Days
- Find, harvest, and cure your local woods and learn quarter splitting from the block
- Sawing, hewing, and shaping by hand or take the easier route board shaping by machine
- Sawn and planed boards will be cut to length and shaped with rasp, file, plane, hand drill, knife, etc.
- Learn to tell if a piece of wood would or would not co-operate with your book
- Plus, learn to form and fit the formerly commonplace, but now often neglected or even negated need for brass clasps
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Third-year students, Elizabeth Bittner and Brenna Campbell, took the class last summer. Jim Croft visited us here in Austin last January for an amazing tool-making workshop. Nothing compares to a bonefolder you’ve made yourself, to fit YOUR hand! 
Filed under Book Arts, Classes/Workshops
Tags: bonefolders, Book Arts, bookarts, bookbinding, books, class, classes, historical, jim croft, old ways, oldways, tools, wooden boards, workshops
