 Hi, I'm Amanda Richards, the preservation technician with the UT Libraries in the Betsy B Creekmore and Special Collections and University Archives Department. And today I'm here with Becky Hunn and she's joining us to show us how to do a little simple stab binding technique. So let's get to the point in library preservation. Hey everyone! I'm going to demonstrate a simple Japanese stab binding technique. It's called the four-hole pattern and guess what? It has four holes. You'll also need four things for this. If you can see a pattern, we're going to roll a lot with four today. Here's what you'll need. Paper with four holes punched in it, a binder clip, and your needle and thread. All right, so we have our four holes punched in here and they are each three quarters of an inch from the end of the spine. So you should be three quarters of an inch in and three quarters of an inch up from the bottom and down from the top. And then the other two holes are just equidistant between those. So we have hole one, two, three, and four. Kind of self-explanatory. But we're going to keep hole four down with the UT Library symbol. So I'm going to flip the book this way so that we can follow the edge of the spine as we're working. Okay, so to start out with we're going to jog our paper. You should be able to see through your holes to the person or camera in front of you. And then we're going to take our binder clip and clip the pages together on the opposite side from the spine. So this will hold our book in place as we are threading it. So to start out with you're going to open your book about halfway through on the spine side. Give or take a couple pages and you're going to take your needle and thread and starting from the middle go down through the bottom of the third hole. And we'll pull this through until we have about two inches of thread left, which we will then tuck down into the book. We're going to hide them down there for a little while and close the book on top. For now we'll want to pinch the thread with our fingers so that we don't lose it as we are binding the spine. But we'll be able to let go of it in a few minutes. So we're going to come back through hole three. So from the bottom where we came out we're going to come around the spine and go back down through hole three. This will create our first beautiful spine loop. And then we're going to go down counting to hole four and come up through hole four. This will create our first line on the back. And at this point we've been pinching our thread. He's pretty solidly in there now. So one of the important things as we are binding this is to keep the thread nice and tight or else your binding is loose and it's going to fall apart and what was the point. So I like to on top of pulling the thread tight as we go place my finger where I've just made a stitch and that way I can hold it in place as I'm continuing to go. And that helps to keep some of the tightness in. Paper is a lot harder to sew than fabric so it's going to be a little bit looser but this helps. So like the spine loop that we created at hole three we're going to do the same thing for hole four. So this time we're going to go around and down and come back up through hole four just like that. And then before we move away from hole four we want to close off the end. So repeating the same motion we just did we're going to go down and come back up through hole four and create this fun little corner that'll help hold our pages in place. Okay so now we're going to go down through hole three. Hole three gets to have a lot of fun in this pattern and now we've got our top two lines as well as our bottom two lines and then we'll come up through hole two just like that and we want to make another spine loop like what we did with three and four. So we'll go down and come back up through hole two and make our spine loop and instead of going back to hole three we're going to go first to hole one and go down through hole one and then create our spine loop for hole one. So we'll come up and go down and around. Now at this point your thread might be getting a little bit short and we want to be careful not to lose it. You really don't want to have to keep rethreading your needle as you're going. It's very annoying. So you might want to pinch the end of your needle where your thread is in the eye of the needle and if you just hold it there it'll help keep your thread from coming out as we're finishing up these last couple of stitches. So like we did with hole four we need to close off the corner. So we're going to come up and around and go back down through hole one on the corner. So we're making another fun little box. Yay the boxes are a fun shape to make and then we're going to come up through hole two. So if you look at the back of your book we've got all of our lines, all of our spine is made and the fun and really cool thing about Japanese stab binding, it's whole aesthetic, is that there are no overlapping threads. So each of our threads and each of our stitches only has one line. That's what makes it that pretty geometric shape that we're getting. So I'm sure you all can see where we're going with this. We're going to have to go down through hole three in order to close off our binding. However, first we're going to take off our binder clip and still holding your thread and needle you really don't want to lose it now. We're going to flip through the book until we find that thread that we left behind. So this time when we go down through hole three you're going to go down and come out at kind of a funny angle right in the middle of the book. We want to join the thread that we left behind so that he has a friend and so that our knot that we're about to tie is going to be hidden in the middle of the book. So still pulling the threads nice and tight we're going to just do a simple double knot just like you're knotting your shoelaces and you'll want to pull it tight and as close down to the spine as possible. So we'll do that twice and then you've got it bound and then we're going to cut off the thread with the scissors that we don't have. Thanks Amanda I already found some. Once you have your thread double knotted you can cut off all this excess that we have leaving a little bit of space so you don't accidentally cut your knot off and then you can take the back end of your needle where the eye is and use it to kind of shove the thread down in the spine so it doesn't peek out while you're using your book. We don't really want to see him again. Get in there. There we go. And now you've got your Japanese stab binding. Hi I'm Amanda Richards with UT Libraries in the Betsy B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives.