The Beady Long Legs in the tree in a reference to that one that drops on you near the landing site in Perplexing Pool around day 30ish that to this day was the most scared a video game has made me.
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.
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.
