My new favourite binding

I'm making a whole bunch of books to get ready for the Beads Paper Water Gift Fair this November, not to mention the Hotel Sask (they'll need more for Christmas too!). I want to get as many nice, simple, books as I can first as basic stock before I get caught up in the stranger, time-consuming ones. On top of that, I'm making myself use up all the supplies I have (as much as possible) before I get anything new. So, leather books first, then on to Coptic and the like to get rid of all the paper I have.

I came up with this way of binding some of the softcover leather books. I will likely make a few of these because the ribbon (and that can easily be suede or something else, to get a different look) both decorates the spine and closes the book in one easy step, and there's very little hole-punching/sewing because there are only three lines of it! But don't worry, the paper still stays in place very well.

A Cover for John

My gospel of John needs a new cover. Or rather, a different way of binding the cover. When I did the project I really didn't have much experience doing any binding, and really wanted it to look 'open' and 'rough,' but this is going a bit far and just looks sloppy and unfinished. Plus the Spanish cedar I used for the covers is extremely porous, and as you can see the glue is not sticking to it. I smells pretty amazing though. The red lines were supposed to echo the ones used in the illustrations.

So, this is my plea for ideas. The wood has to stay. It has four sets of 3 holes in it about an inch from the edge. I'm not sure if anything will stick to it, but let me know if you know of anything that will work. I'm not married to the idea of an open binding. At very least I'm going to do something the cover the back of the signatures. It doesn't have any end pages at the moment.