I made a book once where the cover was actually my wooden paint pallettes. Turned out pretty cool. I bound it with canvas and silver hardware. I guess I could have glued the canvas on with some E6000 or something. It's held up very well, too and I've never seen another one like it! The pages are a combination of vellum, canvas and transparency. Sounds unnattractive when I read this, but it's really cool.

souds good, did you print it up yourself?

Actually, that's where our ideas part ways. I did all of the lettering and text myself with a ruling pen and ink! I printed everything out from the computer and then placed that behind my transparent/vellum pages and sort of traced over it. Very tedious, very time consuming and very worth it!

I would suggest that since it's a single run, you have the pages printed at kinkos or something like that and focus more of your creative energies on the binding and the cover. If you go into a design knowing that its gonna be printed at a quik print type place, then you can work around the limits that are presented with this sort of printing. I've done some mighty nice single runs that were designed to be printed at Kinkos.

Another book that I bound myself was a journal I made. I knew it would hold my deepest, darkest skeletons so I figured I'd go all out for it. I cut out some cardboard that served as the strenght of the cover. I then overlaid that with a natural linen fabric and stitched it together with straw. For the paper inside, I used newsprint that I cut down myself and stitched into the center of the book with another piece of straw. It turned out very nice, too. I love to make books.

When I had my third child, I didn't want my older children (8 and 10 at the time) to get bored while I was in delivery and they were in the lobby. I made them a goody bag that contained a little book that I had hand made for them. The book wasn't all that special in its binding or anything, but the contents had questions for them about mom being pregnant and guess the babies weight and the names they liked and how having another baby had changed our family, etc. etc. It was about 10 pages of questions and comments for them. I still have those books and will treasure them forever. These were printed at kinkos and bound with ribbon. The title of the books was "Today's My Sisters Birthday". It also helped me to find out what areas they were having trouble with and what sorts of things they needed help with as we made the transition!

that sounds really sweet, my mum did a similar thing with me when I was small (5ish years old) - we'd take turns at writing a page of a book and drawing a picture i.e. she started by doing a page then me etc. She'd stitch these up so we could keep them and re-read them. It's the sort of thing you appreciate and keep forever.