Last weekend I visited a friend in the country and I love to go to the thrift store over there. Thrift stores in Amsterdam and other big cities are no fun anymore as the prices are quite high and all the beautiful stuff is gone too quickly.

Thrifting in the country is much more fun: the prices are low and you find the most beautiful things like these vintage books above. Books like that will not even hit the shelves of thrift stores in Amsterdam as they will be sold off to antique shops.

Finding the lace and the embroidery floss made me think of the women who had once possessed them. They were definitely from the area and probably had recently passed away or they were too old to be able to create something with it. The family didn’t see any value in them and so they ended up there.

I intend to make them to good use. Pretty vintage books like these I like to use for rebound books. I take away the text block which I will use in other projects, fill the covers with a variety of papers and then rebind the book, see the picture below.

I can also use the covers for a certain project like a specific class, so that I have all the loose pages in one place like the book above. The two rings hold all the pages nicely together.

In the image above you see three rebound books. The book on the left has two signatures and I nearly finished working in it. The pink book on the right has also two signatures and is completely finished. And the book in the middle is a book from another project with which I used the ‘hinge’ method. This means that two loose pieces of paper are stitched together on a strip of paper so that you can actually bind them. In the image below you can see the middle of the signature which shows the strip. This acts like a hinge of a door or window, hence the name.