For the third year in a row I've done a set of unique bindings for 3 people who have the online newsletter The Xena Prop House bound.  This newsletter is for people who collect props and costumes from the Xena television series that continues to live on even though it went off the air in 2001.  Each of the bindings features a costume piece from that customer's personal collection.  I'll discuss each one individually below.

These are incredibly time-consuming.  Estimates for projects of this complexity are quoted on an individual basis .

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This extremely detailed binding portrays the headdress, sword, and scabbard of the Najara character on Xena. This cover is dark brown goatskin leather that is inset with individual leather-covered pieces to create a design that is raised and inset at the same time.  It is always a challenge to portray a headdress (something that is very 3-dimensional) as a flat image on a cover.  The only way that I could incorporate both items and make them make sense was to make them appear to be "hanging" on hooks.  The headdress is made up of 10 separate pieces covered in pig suede and pared-down cowhide.  The dark blue decoration is added with fabric paint and the headdress is accented with decorative brass rivets.  The sword hilt has a real garnet cabochon at the top (the real prop sword has a red stone there) and is covered with dark gray goatskin that has been pared down thin by hand to take the shape of the underlying sword hilt.  The sword scabbard is a combination of blue-gray pig suede and light tan full-thickness cowhide with cowhide lacing through the holes.  The hooks are black pigskin leather mounted in a recess on an Italia calf leather covered "board" that has been accented with Japanese Suminagashi marbling technique to give it a wood grain look.  The logo for the newsletter is blind stamped on the cover.  This book also has a cloth-covered clamshell box to store it in because that light tan cowhide will get dirty if you just look at it.  It needs protection.  The box is covered with brown print imitation leather cloth and eggshell linen book cloth on the edges.  "Bumpers" were added inside the lid so that the raised elements on the cover sit in air space and do not rub against the inside of the box.

This second binding is very different from the first.  It's the same book on the inside, but the outside of the book is covered entirely in black pigskin leather with a raised design of an Amazon Queen necklace.  Each bead of this necklace was hand-carved from binder's board and added to the cover before the leather was applied.  This raised design is subtle because it is all one color, but it is also very detailed and instantly recognizeable to Xena fans.  It is based on the necklace in this customer's own prop collection.  The cover is also accented with the newsletter logo in pewter foil.

The third cover features a rendering in leather of Xena's main costume gauntlets.  The background leather of this cover is a super-expensive British book leather called "sprinkled calf" because of the darker spatter spots on it.  This leather comes in a light tan color with darker spots and is designed for the bookbinder to darken the leather color using wax.  I darkened this down to be more of a brown-on-brown color (as opposed to light tan with dark spots as it was originally).  This leather costs roughly $45 per square foot.  The gauntlets were created as separate pieces from dark brown goatskin leather that was pared down thin to take the carved shape under it.  The front view is accented with copper pigment and antique-look brass rivets to mimic the real costume piece.  The back view shows the soft leather lining of the real gauntlets; created here with brown pig suede, as well as the lace-up closure and a few more antique-look brass rivets.  The wrap-around leather on the back view was not glued down flat but left loose so it retains the soft appearance of the real costume piece.  The newsletter logo is added to the front cover in dark brown stamping pigment.