Ep. 305: French Link Stitch & Agnes

Bookbinding

In January 2025, I made my second attempt at a French link stitch on a 160-page, A6-size blank notebook called, appropriately enough, The 2025 Blank 160-page French Link Stitch Notebook.

It has eight signatures of five folios each for a total of 160 pages; the title page and the Tedorigawa logo use two of the pages. The other 158 pages are blank. 

I used an interesting scrap of paper I found in my To Be Used Later pile. I glued this scrap to a thin upcycled envelope to make the front and back covers.

I found a chiyogami endpaper, also in the To Be Used Later pile for the endpapers. I think the cover paper and the endpapers work well together; one is mostly abstract while the other is more realistic (but not overly realistic as are most chiyogami papers.)

Finally, I sewed it all together using a French link stitch with blue thread. For the end stations of the signatures I used a kettle stitch. 

The end sections use a simple kettle stitch but on future French link stitch notebooks, I’m going with the more traditional style which I believe looks a tad better.

Other than the end sections completed with the traditional style, what else am I going to change? Possibly to make the sewing tighter and the book less loose. But then I say that about everything I sew from Coptic-bound books to jeans.

 

Fiction

I continue to work on and confuse myself with The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Two plot arches are shaping up. One, Agnes sees visions of people who are about to die or be injured or people who kill someone. Two, her children grow, become independent, and make their mark on society (or societies, in one case). She observes their growth but also “sees” in her trances their deaths, which she can’t prevent or warn.

A complication, at least for me as I’m writing this novel, is coordinating Agnes and her children’s lives with real life in a sort of Forrest Gumpy kind of way. Unlike Forrest, Agnes is not the center of attention for most of the historic action that takes place.

For example, she knows the grandmother of the person who assassinates a US president but not the actual assassin. She has a very tenuous connection with another killer who happens to be a greatx3 or 4 child of a person she used to work with.

A grand scope of a couple of centuries of change surrounds this novel; quite unusual for me. Most of my novels deal with one or two people and truncated time frames. Heart of November, for example, takes place in one month and concentrates on three or four people (with lots of minor characters, of course),

Video

My updated Tedorigawa Bookmakers YouTube channel.

Today’s video is me punching holes in paper for your tactile enjoyment. This time, I don’t shove the awl through my thumb. Success! TDGB Video 40 Punching Holes.