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!
