I'm sure, like me, most people start out bookbinding by buying their linen thread in these 50 gram spools.
It's pretty straightforward - you pull off what you want, maybe you run it across some beeswax and it's ready for
sewing. Then I watched Nick Collishaw's DVD on leather binding and saw him using these skeins of linen.
And I've decided that it was a better way to buy my linen.
Now, at the end of my bindery, I've a selection of different weights of linen thread, most of which I've bought
from Hewit and Sons.
If you look at the old images of the women sewing books, and they must have been very good at sewing, they always had
this loop of thread at the end of their sewing frame.
I'm not sure that they're all plaited, but I'm sure that they all came from skeins of linen.
Here is the skein that I've just received.
The first thing I do is label it, so 18/3 linen bought from
Hewit and Sons. I normally get that knot undone, but it might take me a minute, moment.
So to speed up this video, I'm just going to cut it.
Untangle the skein into one big loop.
Look for a piece of thread that's wrapped around it.
There will be two other spots with knots, which will be the two ends of the continuous length of linen.
I tie the tag where that thread is around the the skein.
And that's going to be the top.
And I'll loop that over the sewing frame.
I normally undo those knots, which are at the ends of the continuous length of thread, but I forgot to do them this
time. And I cut them off just because I'm trying to keep the video short.
But I can normally undo those knots
. Pull all the looseness down to the bottom of the loop.
Now would be the time to undo those two knots, you could see just underneath my hand, and then cut the bottom of the
loop.
Here I'm dealing with the ends of the length of thread which have been tied around the loop to keep it organized,
I'd normally have undone those.
Now everything's nice and straightened out.
Divide the skein into three bundles of thread and plait it like you were plaiting hair.
It's obvious I don't have a lot of experience in plaiting hair, but I get there in the end.
I'm still dealing with the end of that thread that I should have dealt with earlier.
And once you reach the end, just wrap another piece of thread around it and tie it off.
Now, to get a piece of thread, it's simply a matter of grabbing the end, pull it finding one single thread at the
top, grabbing that and pulling it out.
Now, like in that photo of the ladies sewing earlier, you can loop the thread over your sewing frame and again, to get
a thread out, just grab it at the bottom, find a single thread at the top and pull it out.
Of course, the ladies had their thread at the bottom of the
pillar, up the top there it sort of can get in the way of adjusting the frame up and down.