Ok I’m going to be inactive online for a couple more days because this last week has been busy, BUT-
I now have Wi-Fi again and so I can show you the results of my book binding efforts from last week-end!
Behold!
It’s far from perfect, the cover in particular is very crooked (I think I cut it wrong? Maybe I should get better scissors, I alternated between the ones I use for sewing and the surgical ones I use for practicing stitching up human beings. Neither of those are good for paper, apparently).
Still, only second time sewing a book and first time actually binding it, I’m happy with it! I mean, it’s definitely book shaped at least.
The text inside is the Good Omens fanfiction “Pray for Us, Icarus” by @brightwanderer (Atalan), which was one of the very first Good Omens fanfics I ever read all the way back in August 2019. I only added page numbers, to avoid messing the signatures up, but everything else is untouched.
Why is it all in blue? Because that’s the stuff I had at home :D
(Regular posting should resume on Monday or Tuesday, I think. I deeply apologize to the people who began following this blog last week and were welcomed by a void of inactivity. Have a lovely weekend!)
So, I made a mistake with this one
For the cover, I had used a wallpapery plastic -y thinghie I had at home. I thought it would hold, and it was shiiiiiny.
But nope, bad idea, in the span of a few days it began breaking and peeling off, despite the fact that no one was touching the book.
Therefore, I rebound it, this time with some fabric I had at home - a leftover from when I was like, 10, and grandma made us all homemade bed covers.
Cutting off the ruined cover without damaging the rest of it was… a thing…
Honestly, it’s still not perfect, but I feel like I’m learning something new each time. So I’m happy with it, even removing the old cover was good practice.
This is really cool. Like, wow. As someone who loves books and reads primarily fanfiction, binding your favourite stories or maybe your own fics into books yourself is such a great idea. (I made some very shameful attempts years ago which involved an old plastic binding machine for office stuff and lots of glue that don’t really bear talking about…) This looks like a dream, though. So professional! You can put that right into your bookshelf along with books brought from a store. I am equally amazed and jealous of your skills and your new book here.
Also WIP shots including a real deal 17th century pocket book and the stuff I used for the bindings - anything’s a bone folder if it has the right shape :D
Also some of the miniatures I’m working on - they still need to have their covers tooled and finished. Sheep & kidskin (from a fair-trade witch market, do you know how much they want for a kid no one will ask for nowadays? It’s a nightmare!) paper dyed & sewn by hand, cotton endbands by myself.
Also featuring wooden barrels I finished last autumn! I keep spare acorns there :D
Small traveling notebook I finished recently - sheepskin finished with my handcut wooden tools and a pair of metal stamps from a set given to me by an amazing artist from far far away @Ki_Creatures (twitter, no idea if I can even link stuff anymore on this site)
Handsewn & dyed paper, cotton endbands weaved by me and all that :D Extra points if you can recognize some of the items in the set!
Simple book binding tutorial, very useful for making your own personalize Book of Shadows
*screaming*
When I do the sheet of paper on the inside that gets glued to the inside cover and the first pages (I was taught that sheet was called a standard, Idk if that’s correct or not), I usually make it slightly wider than it should be (bear with me here). So, taking the example above, instead of 9"x6", I would make it 9.25"x6". Then, with that extra, when I fold the sheet in half, I make a score mark 1/8" to the right and left of that center mark. When I glue in my standard, that extra gets tucked slightly between the signatures and the cover. I started doing that because I found that my books would either be very tight when opening them, or the standard would buckle in funny ways and wouldn’t look the greatest. After playing around with it several times, adding that extra and tucking it was the best solution I came up with.
Today’s finished project is a bound copy of the whole Interwoven series! I had planned for this to be my fourth Binderary book, but I only got the text block sewing done last month plus putting on the endpapers. Today I sat down and made the case with some of my lovely precut boards (get precut boards from TALAS, it will make you very happy), and cased the block.
Interwoven, or the Seamstress and the Lovable Stray, was published on the SugarQuill in 2002 by an author named Katinka31, who I was unfortunately unable to reach. As the subtitle suggests, it’s the story of an OFC - Abby Loomis, a weaver from a family that can make Invisibility Cloaks - and Sirius Black (remember in GoF, when he says he’s posing as a “lovable stray” in Hogsmeade?); it’s adorably romantic and I’ve had a soft spot for it for yearrrrrssssss. I think it says good things about the SQ as a community that this fic was posted and followed up by many one-shots and short fics in a period when OFCs, particularly OFCs who had romantic relationships with desirable canon characters and had special talents, were regularly mocked and their writers hassled because Mary Sues were seen as the worst thing ever.
OKAY NOW I CAN LET OUT THE NEGATIVITY. I am showing you all the ugliness even though it’s killing me. I don’t know what went wrong when I pasted on the endpapers but they ended up very wavy, and as you can see, moisture got into the text block too. I cut the spine stiffener slightly too wide, which also made casing in pretty difficult, such that I had to unpeel and reposition the back endpaper several times (fortunately I made paste today instead of using PVA) and it stretched BADLY and is now crumply and nasty. Even the front one has some issues, although fortunately it’s not as bad. The first two signatures were printed “color” rather than “black and white”, and even though the text is all black it made a weird blue shadow on all the pages. I made a weaving shuttle graphic to use on title pages of the fics within the series, and I converted the text to PDF at too low of a resolution so they look like ass. I hope someday I can get ahold of Katinka and can make her a copy that doesn’t have these problems!
One more book for the evening! This one. Okay. It’s not a fic. It’s a book. It’s not a GOOD book. But it is authentic erotic rpf dating from the year of our lord, 1861. Ish.
Folks, welcome to The Amorous Intrigues And Adventures Of Aaron Burr
It really isn’t good. But I won’t lie, I’m probably going to make it again. It cracks me up just to have this, and I have an acquaintance who suggested binding it in an authentic 1800s style, and? Yes??? This stupid thing delights me, I want twenty
Okay! I need to start posting pictures from this last month at some point, so let’s start with an easy grouping: a pile of works by @cacodaemonia! When my friend was (actively and deliberately) dragging me down deeper and deeper into the star wars pit, okay, so just imagine her hiding around the corner as I amble along, just minding my own business, her holding the reconstruction corps verse like a baseball bat, lying in wait
It worked!! Oh boy did it work. Will You Walk With Me dragged me in hard, Open Skies sunk its hooks into me, and I was an easy target when Cartography started dropping (and then I was deep enough to start looking up what happens to these characters in canon dgfhjg (we don’t talk about canon))
So! Here we’ve got the RCAU as it was like two and a half weeks ago, so it’s definitely a snapshot of a living verse, but it’s such a shame to hold off binding an au that’s in motion because you’re waiting for it to Conclude. The marbled fabrics with dots are for one shots (WYWYM in orange, Cartography in green), and the peacock marbling is for anthologies (RCAU in pink, Open Skies in blue). The other marbled fabric is a surprise, and the muted, faceted-looking fabric is for Fading Light and Cooling Space, since that wrapped up just as I was formatting these other books. I’ve still got a lot of posts to catch up on, but this was a set that I had been planning on as a project for the month, and it was SO delightful to see that vision realized :D
I made this for @leonarddaquirm in the bound fic exchange in the Renegade Publishing discord. It’s a Rurouni Kenshin fic, where Kenshin’s past and present selves swap places. I had fun stepping out of my usual fandom for this! (I’ve watched the anime, but I was never active in the fandom).
It’s bound in red/blue Duo bookcloth with a cutout effect and faux stab binding around the spine. The title/chapter font is Harukaze and the body font is Cormorant Garamond.
First time I got adhesive foil to stick onto a cover properly, so that was fun. Also my first time putting words on the spine. (I initially tried for the whole title, but the letters were too small to be practical. I think it would have worked with an iron-on, but not an adhesive.)
I should have left more space on the outside margin so that I could guillotine that edge without making the text look off-center.
An anthology of nine of GallaPlacidia’s works. This started with me wanting to bind Scaredy Cat and then quickly became a massive three volume project but I am so so happy with how these turned out!
It took about three months, from typesetting to the final pressing, but I’ve finished binding my trilogy Drifting Together! I was a bit ambitious with this project and paid for it in lots of small alignment mistakes . These books were my first attempts at:
Printing on fabric
Sewing together multiple pieces of fabric into a cover (tricky, lots of math, but necessary because my printer wouldn’t take anything larger than letter sized)
Embroidered covers
Making bookcloth
Translucent vellum title pages
Embroidered faux headbands
Chisel trimming books
The beautiful illustrations are pieces I commissioned from @kurxo way back in 2020. I was, perhaps, a little optimistic about how soon I’d be starting this project.
I bound Raising Warriors by CmonCmon! This is a Star Wars - The Clone Wars story with the rarepair Shaak Ti/Colt set in the Soft Wars AU by @thefoundationproject, which makes it about as niche as it gets, but I helped beta it and I love it.
Sadly I messed up a print and did not have enough paper left to make my own copy, so having it on my own shelf will have to wait - this one is on its way as a gift to Cmon.
Books! I bound the Home Out In The Wind series, which is a Star Wars sequel trilogy Poe/Finn/Rey delight by Bomberqueen. It was typeset by Runawaymarbles, and I jumped at the opportunity to do some binding I didn’t have to typeset first. All my thanks to writer and typesetter for giving permission for others to bind it - I’m thrilled to have these on my shelf!
I had all sorts of plans for matching-but-not-identical covers and then that fell through with simply not having enough matching papers that felt right for the story, so I ended up going with this Duo bookcloth and a printed marble.
Foil iron-on my beloved. It looks so lovely for titles.
My binding of What We Pretend We Can’t See by gyzym as a gift to the lovely @clovenhoofbindery for our recent bookbinding exchange. Photos courtesy of the setting sun and my library’s children section lol. Extra shots under the cut!
My binding of A Turn of the Earth by microcomets! Made as part of a ficbinding exchange for my friend Sapphy! Extra shots of the hand-drawn title page art and scene dividers under the cut!
My special, tiny binding of a very interesting story, Triquetra by Kirstyn McDermott. This is an A9 sized book, trimmed by only a few millimeters. This story is available to read on Tor’s websiteor for purchase as an ebook through Am*zon, so I decided to print and bind it for my tiny book library. My first time ever trying raised cord bindings and the scale of the work was not in my learning favor lol. Internal and process shots below the cut!
