#bookshellbindery

Hello from a blustery bindery!

As summer drifts into Autumn and family days on the beach settle in the memory, we remain buoyant with a bit of a nautical theme in the bindery this month. I apologise now for all the boat-related puns! 

Not only do we have an exciting new stockist on-board, but head to the bottom of this email for your chance to win one of our nautical inspired notebooks ... It’s starting to feel a lot cooler (and wetter) now in Cornwall, but we’re embracing the changing seasons by eating lots of hearty soup and resisting the urge to turn the heating on, although bookbinding with cold fingers is pretty tricky! We’re also looking forward to the ‘big boat lift’, which has become a bit of a family tradition since moving to the harbour town of Falmouth. We like to get cosy in a local cafe and watch through the window as one-by-one, all the leisure boats are hauled from the water, dripping with salty brine and sea slime, ready to be tucked up in storage for the winter – a surprisingly mesmerising spectacle and a fitting way to mark the changing of the seasons. We’ll try and share some pictures when it happens in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

Zoe x

New stockist

As long term fans of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, we're delighted to reveal we're now stocked in their fantastic gift shop. David hand delivered the cargo last week as, amazingly, the NMMC is actually closer to the bindery than our nearest Post Office! Our nautical inspired pocket notebooks are a great fit for their marine-mad customers and we’re looking forward to future collaborations. Our two small boys love their weekly visits to the museum, so it’ll be great to see some familiar Bookshell wares in there too - and the boys might get a bit of a surprise!

New bookbinding supplies

Now, I do love a photo shoot, and many Bookshell products allow fun shoots with cool props in great locations, but last week I was faced with the not-so-easy task of photographing blank paper – our lovely new A3 bookbinding paper, to be exact. This forms part of our expanding range of bookbinding supplies following the success of our A4 bookbinding paper. I found myself staring blankly at the equally blank paper as I was left wondering how on earth do I make paper look interesting?? A bit of playing around, lots of head scratching and several strong coffees later, I think I managed to finally get the ‘shot’ and hopefully do this professional quality bookbinding paper justice.

The horizontal lined short grain bookbinding paper is available in both A4 and A3 sizes, in two colours - cream or white, and comes blank or with medium college-ruled lines.

Competition

If you’d like to win one of our gold foiled nautical notebooks, complete with personalised gift box and pencil, then embrace the maritime mayhem and send us your best sea-related pun or maritime-inspired saying via social media with the hashtag #bookshellmademedoit. Make sure you tag us too! I know, I know, it might seem like we're scraping the barrel, but if there was some good strong spiced rum in that barrel to start with, that's fine with David and me! (Closing date is Monday 11 October 2019).

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Blackberry vodka

What better way to celebrate the Autumn hedgerow harvest than with this delicious tipple?

• Take around 500g (or more, or less) well-washed fruit and 250g) of caster sugar  (you can adjust to taste but the more sugar, the quicker it is palatable!) and add to a large sterilised jar (we tend to use Kilners that have been sterilized in the oven at 120c for 20 mins). Top up with 1 litre of inexpensive gin or vodka.

• Place your jar in a dark cupboard for two months and every time you remember, give it a shake to dissolve the sugar: I do this once a week initially.

• After two months (you could go to three months but don’t leave too long) strain through muslin or a jelly bag into clean bottles, and then wait....the longer you wait the better it tastes but even a couple of months makes it drinkable. (Tip - make sure to label your bottle well, we use one of our leather bottle labels)