Ficbinding: The Bone Eater by CluckU
(Listen, taking pics is not my talent. Just ignore the Wrestlemania tier list in the background.)
The fic: SPN, Castiel/Dean Winchester, E, 119.3k
This fic is amazing. It's dark as I like and breathtaking, and it's a fantastic exploration of my favorite character, Dean Winchester. He's completely believable as CluckU writes him, there's not a doubt in my mind that that's how he would react if kidnapped and fed on by a minotaur, even at the times in the story when I wished he'd go against his instincts to protect himself. Also, the monster in this fic is so cool. He's well written, menacing, pathetic in a way, and so terrifying because of the way he feeds and how implacable he is.
Special mention to the whole Misery vibe of this fic and especially chapter 15, that was so well done.
Read the tags.
The bind: This is one of my most complex works to date, for several reasons. Let's start with the palette. White for te very bare cell Dean lives in and to contrast with other colors; red on the endbands and ribbon for blood (and there's a lot of it here); silver on the edges and endpapers for the medical instruments and table; black because I don't have grey cloth and I thought it'd contrast better with white to make the prison bars pattern.
The first difficulty was trimming and sanding the textblock. It was too thick for my ream cutter and as I said before, I'm losing my faith in it. So I trimmed each one of the 18 signatures by hand, then sanded the block with my new power sander. It took a long time and made a lot of noise, and the heat made it hard to work for long, but I'm loving this new tool. The smoothness of the edges was so satisfying.
Then I spray-painted edges for the first time. And it didn't go so well. It seemed okay, but for some reason paint still rubs off my fingers even though it's dry, so I have to be very careful when handling the book. I'm thinking of giving up acrylic paint in favor of laque spray next time.
Another thing I was apprehensive about was the straight spine. I'm a round spine guy, I have very little experience with straight ones, but it went alright! It's good! I don't think I'll make it a regular occurrence, though, I find it nerve-racking.
The last tricky thing was the cover pattern. (You can see it well in the sun if you click on the picture above.) It wasn't hard to think up or to figure out, mathematically speaking, but it was long, hard work in the July heat to cut the strips and glue them on the cover in a regular fashion. Took me hours. But it came out looking great!
I did make a little mistake, though: I prepared the casing last night and I was so tired I glued the book in it by automatism, but I should have added the stripes before putting the book together.
I could have used a Greek theme throughout, but the minotaur myth is too modernized in this story for that, so I confined these references to the front page. A non-serif font because this is mostly Dean's POV and if you've read my previous ficbinding post, you know my feelings on that.
And then bones! For the chapter headings, I used a pelvic bone that cradles the chapter number. The only chapter with a different heading is chapter 15, with the hand, for reasons obvious to those who have read the fic. And a nice femur as a divider. Really, the pelvis, hand and femur are the most important bones in The Bone Eater. The all look crisp, I'm happy with that.
I wrestled with my printer a while and couldn't get it to print the right shade of red, I'll have to look into that next time.
Wow, I had a lot to say this time! It was a very interesting one, craft-wise.
Fonts: title and chapter numbers: Lethal Craze Demo, author name: Hey August, text: TT Fors Trial. All free on Dafont.
Materials: Black and white cloth from Schmedt, 2mm grey board, 70g/m² white copy paper, synthetic bookmark and headbands. Silver endpaper bought in store.
Feel free to ask me more about materials and fonts (or whatever), it won’t bother me at all to tell you what I used, I just can't think of anything else right now.
