North Branch Projects

Join us in person for the Earth Day Workshop with Fleet Feet & New Balance—fun, fitness, and sustainability!

Get ready to celebrate Earth Day by joining us for a fun and eco-friendly workshop hosted by Fleet Feet and New Balance!

Join visual artist Regin Igloria, founder of North Branch Projects, for a hands-on Community Binding workshop that brings together creativity, sustainability, and movement. In this collaborative session, participants will learn accessible bookbinding techniques—such as hand-sewn pamphlets and zines—while transforming repurposed materials (including running shoe packaging) into unique, handmade books.

Designed for runners, creatives, and curious beginners alike, the workshop explores the connection between artistic practice and active lifestyles, with a special focus on sustainability within the running community. Guided prompts will help participants develop personal content, and everyone will leave with several handmade books while contributing to an ongoing community archive.

All materials are provided. No experience necessary.
Your $10 ticket will get you a $10 gift voucher to use at Fleet Feet Chicago.

Many thanks to and for the support in initiating this project with us, and to for the 📸📸📸

We’re back at for the new student club, every other Monday learning new binding techniques and making books!

DM us for more info on our next meeting!
Many thanks to for hosting us 😎📚✌🏽

A beautiful day for a workshop at 📚

Today we worked on the buttonhole stitch and came away with a versatile handbound journal/sketchbook. Many thanks to the staff and participants—what a great group of students (with such sharp color choices)! Afterwards, I enjoyed a cold brew from the cafe and couldn’t resist the market. I’ve started a tradition: books…then beets. So good!

👀📚

Sketchbook Saturday ✌🏽
Today we go back to 1999, a century coming to a close and a glimpse into another sketchbook falling apart and needing some repair. I’ll do a short video on how I restitch these one day.

I devoted quite a few pages on my trip to Iceland to run the Reykjavik Marathon in August—my first trip to Europe and first international marathon. I was still capturing photos with a disposable camera and getting blurry prints of the course. It was a small-ish race that looped twice around the city, much of it without any crowds or fanfare. I got 25th place—that’s how small the field was!

I enjoyed reading the journal entries towards the end of the book: plotting and scheming for a cross country bicycle trip (which ultimately happened but on the West Coast), ambitions to do a residency at Ragdale (lol), ideas for a Polaroid sketch project of everyone I encounter starting in 2000, some serious naïveté about making art all the time, and correspondences (an actual letter!) from people I no longer know of their whereabouts.

Next week I will dig into some storage unit excavations (we’re talking high school sketchbooks). Fun 😎
#1999

Our first workshop at Mayfair Branch of 😎✌🏽📚

Many thanks to Stefanie Brown for the invitation, and to the young bookbinders who participated this afternoon! It’s always good to be back in the neighborhood!

Getting these response books up and running again, especially as they allow for social distancing in unexpected ways.
@ Albany Park

We worked with to put together this bookbinding tutorial and it's available for free anytime online. Check it out when you have time and share with anyone who is interested in making pamphlets. 📙💥📌✂️❤️🍩☕️

Basic Handmade Books Using Recycled Materials with Regin Igloria In this first video of our new Open House Virtual Book Arts Workshops, Regin Igloria shows how to take recycled cereal, donut and granola boxes (and also piz...

RIP dear Lindsay Obermeyer. You are much loved and will be missed. Thank you for your work as an artist and mother. ❤️💔❤️

It's a beautiful day out! Stop by and knit with Lindsay Obermeyer and the Red Thread Project this afternoon!

Distance learning with coffee and books is alright by us. Thank you to for hosting this virtual class and allowing us to work with so many others from our evolving basement studio in Albany Park.
@ Albany Park, Chicago

Here's a great resource!

Resources — Asian American Feminist Collective We are assembling an Asian American Feminist resource guide and we would love to draw on the strength of our community to keep adding readings you think are important for the Asian American Feminist movement. If you would like to add a resource to the guide, please submit it via this Google form!

Rethinking what “Community Binding” means when you aren’t allowed to be together at the same work table. In the meantime, we can make blank sketchbooks and keep pressing on.
@ Albany Park, Chicago

We're leading a bookbinding workshop on recycled/re-purposed materials tomorrow with Creative Chicago Reuse Exchange - CCRX!