Bookbinding Workshops by Shelbyville

Bookbinding Workshops by Shelbyville Also available for public events, private workshops, and book commissions. Please visit my website www.shelbyville.com.au for more details.

Shelbyville offers a wide range of Brisbane-based creative bookbinding workshops, including making leatherbound journals, sketchbooks, and a wide variety of artistic books. My name is Michelle and I'm a Brisbane-based designer/maker who has been professionally teaching bookbinding workshops for the last 15 years. Shelbyville is the name of my blog + brand, encompassing bookbinding, zines, products, and lots of other creative projects, and can be found online at www.shelbyville.com.au
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I recently set up 'Bookbinding Workshops by Shelbyville' to help promote my range of creative bookbinding workshops, which I hold monthly throughout locations in Brisbane.

VWB, the planned companion to VW3 (one day)… And yes, I know this picture is very faded, and the colours are wrong, but ...
07/08/2026

VWB, the planned companion to VW3 (one day)… And yes, I know this picture is very faded, and the colours are wrong, but it IS over 20 years old :/
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The canvas is sitting down there in my garage, the outlines have already been pencilled out, all I need to do is actually apply the actual paint to the actual canvas…

Promise to self: When this Red Doors & Robots exhibition concludes at the end of August, I will have set up my easel and oil paints and I will complete both these paintings completely, finally..!

It’s a sign…***RED DOORS & ROBOTS is open for viewing, and this handmade ‘concertina panorama’ book is the exhibition’s ...
06/08/2026

It’s a sign…
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RED DOORS & ROBOTS is open for viewing, and this handmade ‘concertina panorama’ book is the exhibition’s namesake. And that’s its name now spelled out in corrugated cardboard letters! 🙌🏼

Also featuring in this gallery corner is an oil painting called VW3 that I did when I was first discovering the joys of urban wandering and photography - and this is the first time it’s ever been viewed in public!...
I was quite impressed when alan innes immediately identified the location of this long-since-demolished warehouse as being on Gibbon St in Woolloongabba. This man truly and thoroughly knows Brisbane’s urban landscape!

Our Opening Day event is happening this Saturday from 10am to 2pm, and you can hear Alan talk about his incredible urban illustration work at 11am (free), or take part in a 2hr workshop to make your own Concertina Panorama book featuring Alan Innes’s sketches (12-2pm, $45pp), or just have a look at the work, chat with me/Alan and have a scone and a cup of tea 🫖
We’d love to see you there!

PS. The bookstore upstairs is super lovely too - Julie has a terrific selection of books!

Give it a tray…***I’ve been collecting ‘found things’ from the sidewalk for decades now, and fair to say I’ve amassed qu...
05/08/2026

Give it a tray…
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I’ve been collecting ‘found things’ from the sidewalk for decades now, and fair to say I’ve amassed quite a few.
Needing something practical to house them all in (and give them some semblance of order), I started custom-making these trays that would stack neatly in a corner of my studio’s storage bench.
I lasercut the boxboard pieces (one side etched with the name FOUNDERLY THINGS), and then hand assembled/glued them together, using my trusty set of magnetic corners.
Then I covered each tray with a paper wrap (six trays in total) with meticulous mitre-ing and reinforced inside corners. I estimated that it would have cost me about $100 to use bookcloth, whereas the textured paper only cost me $5..! 😅
So six custom-made trays cost me about a day’s work and $3 in paper 😂 but I sure learnt a lot from this little project!
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You can see the trays and their lovingly sorted/curated ‘found things’ cargo, as the table’s centerpiece at the currently showing Red Doors & Robots exhibition.
😃

04/08/2026

Gotta get back into this IG thing again 🤦‍♀️ Been a long hiatus, but I got heaps of good stuff I’ve been working on, and developing, and rediscovering, and when I picked up his book in Bent Books today Austin Kleon says on page 44 of ‘Show Your Work’ that I should “share something small every day”…
So, this post.
And a quiet personal commitment to ‘show my work’ more, again.
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RED DOORS & ROBOTS, an exhibition of work by me and Alan Innes, showcasing a swathe of original artworks in urban illustration, artist books, collage and assorted other creative things inspired by our cityscape and the things found in its streets…
Alan got the vertical surfaces, I got the horizontal surfaces. Our artwork plays nicely together! 😂
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Exhibition opens today
(that’s us setting it up yesterday👆🏻)
And runs until the near-end of August.
Scrumptious Reads bookstore/gallery
Red Hill.
It’s quirky.
Come visit :)

Sydney bookbinding workshops!***I’m offering two different Shelbyville bookbinding workshops down in Sydney this coming ...
02/02/2026

Sydney bookbinding workshops!
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I’m offering two different Shelbyville bookbinding workshops down in Sydney this coming weekend: Secret Belgian binding on the Saturday (7 Feb) and Cross-structure leather journals on the Sunday (8 Feb).
Swipe across for all the details, and click over to my website for more pics/descriptions and the link to book. Only a handful of places available ☺️

Excited for this Sydney road trip! It feels like I’m coming full circle because it was in Sydney, at this very same NSW Guild bindery in Callan Park, Lilyfield that I actually began my workshop teaching career back in 2008!
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20/01/2026

Letterpress + Coptic binding
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And the colourful results of an amazing weekend spent making letterpress prints and then turning them into hand bound books - what a great bookbinding workshop experience for each of us!

I’d left all the letterpress prints spread out across the tables to dry overnight - and it was such a riot of colour to behold when we walked into the room the next day!

Four hours (maybe a few hours more for some…) of selecting, sorting, cutting, folding, gluing and stitching, and each person had a gloriously unique Coptic bound book of their very own to take home…
💙📚💛
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Letterpress play day ***Spent a deliciously inky day with the crew at and a bunch of adventurous ladies making stacks o...
29/11/2025

Letterpress play day
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Spent a deliciously inky day with the crew at and a bunch of adventurous ladies making stacks of lovely letterpress prints ready for tomorrow’s Coptic bookbinding workshop.

My sample books are pictured here hanging out with the woodblock type…

Looking forward to seeing what everyone makes with these prints in class tomorrow :)

18/11/2025

Beautiful results (and the fantastic participants) of the Criss-cross A5 Leather Journals workshop recently.
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I really should remember to take more little videos of the finished books!

Criss-cross A5 Journals bookbinding workshop ***A delightful class with some wonderfully vibrant results! Criss-cross bi...
18/11/2025

Criss-cross A5 Journals bookbinding workshop
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A delightful class with some wonderfully vibrant results!

Criss-cross binding always looks great, and every combination is uniquely selected by its maker, which is what makes each journal so special.

Well done to all the participants who took the tricky technique easily in their stride, with lots of smiles (laughter and conversation) during the workshop.
You were such a happy bunch!
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Letterpress + Coptic = happiness! 🩷🧡💛🩵***The awesome folks at gave me a stack of their letterpress prints so I could ma...
11/11/2025

Letterpress + Coptic = happiness!
🩷🧡💛🩵
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The awesome folks at gave me a stack of their letterpress prints so I could make some sample Coptic books for our upcoming joint workshop at the end of November.

So I sorted them into 3 different colourways, matched them with a whole lot of coordinating papers, and bound the three books with multi-needle Coptic…two in portrait format, one in A5 landscape, just to try something different…

Also not my usual colour palettes, but loving the bright and fun results, and all that delightfully textured letterpressed inkiness!!

Workshop details:
Sat 29 Nov 2025 > a day of letterpress with Moveable Type Studio (Yeronga)
Followed by…
Sun 30 Nov > an afternoon of binding your prints into a Coptic bound A5 journal, with me at The Nest in West End.
Both days, all inclusive of materials, for $400pp.
Very limited bookings (only 8 spots) so very exclusive and hands-on ;)

If you’re in Brisbane and this sounds like something you’d be interested in, DM me and I’ll send you the link to the tix on Humanitix (or Google search it).
📚
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Address

31 Ferry Road, West End
Brisbane, QLD
4101

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