Alas,  no more ski jumping or biathlon for four more years, unless there is a station like ESPN62: Nerd Sports for Insomniacs.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that a big part of why I like the winter Olympics better is that they’re so dangerous. I mean, I am the person who worries during the first few figure skaters that one of them is going to fall down and slice their own hand off.

What am I supposed to worry about during track and field? That someone might skin a knee?

(Favorite summer events: pole vaulting, platform diving, vault, fencing, archery. It’s a sickness.)

Anyway, the closing ceremony is on, and to distract myself from my misery, this post is about books.

I don’t just read them, oh no. I am a tiny baby bookbinder. I’ve taken a couple of classes at the Museum of Printing History (one of my favorite things about Houston), and it rekindled my interest.

In a class called “Small Books from Everyday Objects,” we made four books in one afternoon. One, a Coptic binding made with fortune-telling cards, I gave to my sister.

This one is just “Mexican bingo cards” (I’m not even sure what that means) and bookbinder’s tape: about 1 minute total (with precut paper) to make a SUPER cute book

This was also fun and easy, using a miniature cereal box for an easy little two-signature book. The side panel of the box is folded in like a W to separate the signatures.

This one was interesting and hilarious: the covers are cut from an AOL marketing CD. I had no idea that heating a CD with a hairdryer would make it soft enough to cut with scissors.

Here’s the origami inside of that one:

It was one of those really beautiful meeting-at-crossroads sort of classes: we all had such a fun time and got along so well that we exchanged email addresses and vowed to meet again. We didn’t – I’ve only known that to happen once – but it was a brilliant afternoon anyway.

Then I went to a meeting of the Houston Book Arts Group and learned long-stitch binding:

That is a lot of hole-punching, let me tell you. I spent the evening hanging out with a man my grandfather’s age who was nonstop charm. Here’s a terrible picture of the front of the book:

(Can you tell I have a hard time caring about photography?)

The Vermeer cover is from a pile of book jackets I scored out of the recycling bin in the Cataloging department of Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, in about 1996. I think it was good to wait, because this came out great. The bead is one my parents bought in Murano. This book is destined to go to my mom, who plans to write her dreams about my dad in it.

Then there was a drought in good classes at the museum, so I pulled out an old book, Cover to Cover, that I bought even earlier than rescuing book jackets from the trash. I hope to go through, beginning to end, just to build my skills.

The first project is a very simple little pamphlet. I used paper from a pad of drawing paper. The cover is a picture from a calendar, and the tie is some crazy silver stretchy stuff that’s been in my wrapper paper box since the middle ages.

More hobbies that keep me from writing! At least I could write IN these.