Tag Archives: fun day

Button Hole Stitch Binding

Every year our staff, students and volunteers look forward to our Student & Volunteer Appreciation day, which we affectionately call “fun day”. It generally takes place in late November or early December, always before finals week. It is a time to show our appreciation for all the hard work our students, volunteers and staff do throughout the year, while having an opportunity to come together and learn some new bookbinding or book arts technique. In the past, we’ve done paper marbling, made handmade paper, created German long stitch binds, and more.

I have been coordinating our student & volunteer appreciation days for almost as long as I’ve been in the Lab, so for at least 12 years now. I love it because I am the type of person who enjoys planning these types of things, but also I love watching a student, volunteer or staff member just get really excited about something new. You never know if it’s going to be that quiet new volunteer who just can’t get enough of paper marbling, or that student who doesn’t have any art background but just does the most amazing pulp paintings ever! So after all these years, the thought of 2020/the pandemic ruining everything and not having any sort of student/volunteer appreciation day was just unacceptable!

I immediately thought, “What types of activities could we do virtually that would be no cost to the lab and would give everyone a couple hours to come together and decompress?” After a little brainstorming with Holly, we came up with a Button Hole Stitch binding (which I had recently learned) and a simple dissolving view. With the help of my wonderful student staff member and cohort buddy, Lexie, I prepped kits for our virtual event, as well as prepared a step by step video on creating a button hole stitch binding.

Here are some of the beautiful creations that came out of our little virtual fun day:

  • Dissolving view
  • Dissolving view
  • Dissolving view
  • Dissolving view

If you would like to make your own Button Hole Stitch book check out our video on the Preservation Lab MediaSpace channel:

For the dissolving view we used Green Chair Press’ handy template, which you can find here in their blog post on dissolving views.

Jessica Ebert [UCL] – Conservation Tech/Photographic Documentation Specialist/Student Supervisor

Student and Volunteer "Fun Day"!

Our student assistants and volunteers are a dedicated, hardworking group of individuals and they are invaluable to the Lab. They are constantly learning new treatments, expanding their preservation knowledge, and helping our Lab move forward and treat general collection items. For the students, this means they do all this while going to school full-time at the University of Cincinnati. So, every year we like to pick a day or two around the holidays to celebrate our students and volunteers and say “thank you” by treating them to a little bit of preservation-related fun. We appropriately call these our “student/volunteer fun days”.
We always pick an activity that will be enjoyable for the students/volunteers, but also benefit the Lab in some way. In the past this has included paste paper and paper marbling. For both we asked everyone to donate a portion of their papers to the Lab for our supply. This year for “fun day” we decided to demonstrate and create a selection of book structures with the idea that the people could expand their conservation skills and learn new techniques, and afterward the Lab would have a selection of models of the various structures.
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