Purple Cloth Wedding Guest Book with Purple Leather Accent
This couple found my website only a few weeks before their wedding. They had hoped for a guest book done entirely in purple leather, but there was no time to order it. There ARE many colors of leather out there, but I do not stock them all and if it's an unusual color (in bookbinding, it's unusual if it isn't brown, black, navy, or some other dark color), it can take several weeks or months to get it. Also, special colors add A LOT to the cost of a book. A single small goatskin in a custom-ordered color can cost well over $100 for JUST that piece of leather. In this case, I did have small pieces of purple leather left over from another project. So the problem was solved by using purple vellum bookcloth for most of the cover, but adding an accent strip of the purple leather at the front edge of the front cover. I also added the type in gold and the tree decoration in gold using type and decoration I already had (so we saved some time by not having to custom-order a die). Their title "For Centuries to Come" was stamped in gold (the idea being that this marriage would lead to generations of children and was the starting point for the future of their family tree for centuries to come) and the wedding date and location were blind stamped in the leather below the title. Blind stamping only works on certain types of leather, so the cloth part of the cover could not be stamped in this way. This guest book also had a ribbon page marker with floral emboidery on it giving it a brocade look. In spite of the last-minute rush, they did have the book in time for the wedding.
A book like this would cost around $175.