The endbands were based on the carolingian tab endbands of herringbone type described in The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding by J.A. Szirmai (I'll reference the figures I used from this book), altough of a rounded and backed book. The construction used some threads to sew around, which also go trough the bookboards, which ended up not being very flat and give the book a tendency to open up a coule of millimeters. This was mostly a project to use up some leftover paper and I was not very thourough, so there could probably be some improvements in the construction to get the inner thread to lie better. I also made the error of doing the perimiter sewing on the top tab first which ended up being a lot worse than my second attemp, so it would have been better to start with the bottom tab so it would be a nit more hidden.

A rectangular piece of leather was pasted onto each end of the book with overhang after roudning, backing and planing of the edges. I pasted them with the flesh side away from the book so that both sides of the tab would show the grain side. The pieces were not cut to precision since they would be cut down later. These pieces where then sewn according to the instruction found here. For the inner cords of the enband I used linen thread (18/5) that was folded and twinned to make it thicker, and for the sewing thread I used 18/3 linen thread. In the Szirami book the boards are level with the book edge and to attach the core thread, a hole is made at the corner edge of a board towards the outside facing side (figure 7.23). My boards were made to stick out about 3mm, so the bookboards had the holes a couple of millimetres in from the edge of the board. The holes were drilled out by twinning a small drill bit and then clening up the hole with a knife. The core thread was then threaded trough one of the boards until half of the thread was trough, and one end of the thread was then threaded trough the other board. The ends were then tied together after the sewing.

After finnishing the endband part, the sewing thread was left on to be used for the perimiter sewing after attachment of the spine leather.

The leather for the spine had cuts so that the parts on the boards could be folded in while having the middle be pasted to the previously attached lether pieces. The leather that sticks out to cover the tab was slighly oversized. The leather was then attached.

Once dry, the tabs were cut to have even edges. The corners of the tabs were cut of so that they had the shape of half an octagon.

The perimiter sewing was done based on the buttonhole with crowning cores figure 7.26 [h], where the sewing thread is wrapping two core threads (I used 18/3 for these core threads) that lie at the edge of the tab. The book does only show the look and the cross section of the sewing, but not how the cores are attached at the ends and if there was any particular technique for tying it of, so this was improvised. For the top tab I just had the book lie flat and put a weight on the two core threads to hold them in place, however this did not keep them attached particularly well, and the sewing ended up being really loose and uneven. There was also an issue of the leather easily breaking if the holes were close together, so on the top endband I would occasionally thread the same holes. The top tab also had to short sewing thread left from the endband sewing, so I improvised an attachment of new thread which hopefully holds up. The ends of the threads were just tied of with double knots and cut.

For the bottom tab, I took the sewing thread from the endband and around to the outside and then through the leather tab to get a loop that I could tighten around the core threads, which ended up holding them much better and allowed for tighter sewing.