#bookbinding journal

[binding-amaris]

I tried my hand at making some notebooks! They're not perfect but for my second binding attempt they are really great. I will be looking to invest in a heavy duty guillotine cutter though on behalf of my wrist 😅😅😅

I used a thicker high quality cardstock to print some collages. The paper is a smooth, high quality, cream colored 86 gsm. They all have approximately 60 pages- give or take a few.

[indefinitevoid]

bookbinding journal (part 1) 

link to main post

First attempt at bookbinding: “corrina, corrina“ on AO3 by curlymcclain! Thanks a lot for giving me permission to make this and for writing this wonderful fic :))

This is just a record of what I did during the process for future reference and those interested (long post ahead)

Text Formatting

Followed this tutorial by @/ArmoredSuperHeavy: (so helpful; wouldn’t have done anything without it): https://docs.google.com/document/d/11JyVxeRS8yEWgCYrNMUPlNrEbR5AAD3Z2aDP-QXEP3Y/ 

I decided to use 7.75” x 11” paper folded in half, cutting ⅜’’ off the top and bottom edges of normal letter-sized paper. Pretty worth it b/c I needed to trim the edges after binding anyway.

Used Garamond size 11.5 font. Ended up with 84 pages total; I couldn’t reasonably fit it in 72, 80, or 96. Signatures were 20-20-20-24.

Apparently, I spent 595 minutes total editing the original Word document… It was really fun though! (seriously, the first several hours on the word doc, i was the most excited i had been in a while)

Note to future self: be careful with Word’s automatic table of contents and check for accidental new lines at the beginning of pages.

Printing

Turns out, my home printer prints faint text and smears a little.

So, I tested the school printers (yes, I test-printed fanfiction in the school library). The front and back of sheets didn’t line up (shows badly in the header). Fail.

Ended up using our 6-year old discarded black-and-white printer that we dumped at an office, which worked perfectly!

Used 92 brightness 20 lb paper (default). Never realized that printer paper was so see-through, but it’s good for books (yay!).

I was concerned about the paper grain facing the “wrong way”, but didn’t have anything else. I heard that it should be alright since the paper is relatively thin?

Hole Punching

Created a guide with thicker paper, laid on top. Push-pin to poke the holes. Binder clips to keep everything together. Propped the folded pages on an open sketchbook. Worked great, but poked holes into the inside spine of the sketchbook. Whoops.

Holes seemed to move a bit between signatures, not sure why. Mostly gets covered up during stitching though.

I later found out that you can punch holes with the paper face-down on top of corrugated cardboard. Will most definitely be doing this next time.

Text Block Stitching

Used the kettle/link method by Sea Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O4kFTOEh6k 

Used doubled-up thin white thread and waxed it with a candle.

Bound a bit loose for the first few signatures, but the last one was good. Knots and ends were a bit sloppy (kept sticking into the book). Accidentally hooked up the bottom line of stitches on the outside spine.

Note from the future: this had literally zero impact

Glueing the Spine

Elmer’s Glue + Binder Clips + parchment paper + hardcover book cover & clipboard. No mull.

Glue seeped in a tad bit between signatures, so those pages seemed a bit more “stuck together”.

This is when I realized that this had to be hardcover due to the way I bound it (falls open too easily for paperback).

Endpages

Luckily, I acquired some dark blue paper from the unused-paper-pile in an office. All of the other colors were light and didn’t go well with the planned beige cover, so light-dark contrast here we go.

Interestingly, I think this paper had the grain in both directions, kind of like the texture of canvas cloth up close.

Then, I put more glue on the spine and laid a piece of paper over it.

Trimming Edges

This step got delayed a week due to my inability to acquire a craft knife.

This was definitely the hardest part, since I've never used a paper-cutting knife before (other than 6th grade technology class), let alone on a stack of 46 pages.

Some edges were a bit uneven, but nothing majorly bad happened (that's a win). 

I went back later to fix the worse parts and used a nail file on some weird areas. One is probably not supposed to nail-file paper, but it worked…

The trimmed block of text:

Making the Cover

Used this tutorial from Sea Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_rU-yOPd4

I used cardboard from a cereal box because all the other cardboard around was corrugated. And beige cardstock as the "bookcloth" (also taken from the aforementioned office).

Cutting out the cardboard took way longer than it should have, because I kept cutting away from the ruler. Doubled up the cardboard on the spine, which I forgot to include in later calculations, so the cover ended up ~1.5 mm short on width. I glued the covers and spine on a piece of printer paper first in order to have them spaced apart correctly

The beige cardstock was only letter-size, so I had to glue two pieces together with a 7-8 mm overlap. Required some math to figure out where to put the cover title.

Then, I just glued the pieces of cardboard onto the beige paper and folded it up. I was originally worried, since beige cardstock is very different than bookcloth, but it honestly turned out as well as it could have. 

The book cover (not sponsored):

(the white paper around the spine is the printer paper)

Final Glueing

This step was pretty simple, though I forgot the fact that glue is wet, and some moisture seeped into the first/last few pages and made them a bit wavy (this all happened in ten minutes). To remedy this, I put tissues between a bunch of pages and pressed it overnight, which actually worked; the pages are no longer wavy. Downside is that the cover got warped inwards a bit (concave up). 

The next day, I used a hairdryer, which I probably could’ve done before. Then pressed it without anything inside for a few hours and it flattened out. The pages aren’t completely flat, but otherwise, it pretty much looks like a book :D

I also got a lot of guidance on several steps from rerurumo’s bookbinding videos, so thanks to them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XCvTZRVbgg

More photos:

the unintended seam on the front cover:

the back cover seam:

the thing that my elementary teacher said not to do to books:

some pages:

noo the book isn’t perfectly flat D:

the stack of books used to press down:

alr that’s all for now o_O

[indefinitevoid]

bookbinding journal (part 3)

link to main post

about the process of making this:

long post under cut

Unfortunately, I didn’t keep records for this project along the way, so I’m going off of memory.

Followed these two tutorials:

How to Make a Book by @/ArmoredSuperHeavy  

perfect binding tutorial by porsche and coffee

Microsoft Word informs me that I spent 16 hours editing the document. I had to redo formatting a few times because I kept changing my mind about page sizes. + technical difficulties.

I went with 5′’ x 7′’ pages, which is smaller than half of a letter-sized sheet of paper, so I decided to format it (for printing) like this:

for context...

1. i found a paper cutter in my local library 2. it did not cut straight lines

therefore, i decided to rip the paper instead of cutting it (which leaves fuzzy edges) and then orient the pages so that all of the fuzzy edges are either the bottom edge or on the spine (hence the awkward gap between each page) 

note from future: look, we got a clean top right corner :D

with my remaining braincells, i found that the setting used for perfect-bound books is 4 pages per sheet.

While glueing, I attached a spare page to the front and back (to cut off later b/c of glue stains)

Because of the paper-grain issue, the paper near the spine warped (into surprisingly high-frequency waves), but it flattened out after drying under a stack of books.

Some of the pages ended up more stuck together than others, so I suppose it’s important to check for those and cut them apart after glueing.

Used dark-blue paper for endpapers (going with the dark-light contrast again).

My original plan was to have the cover edges flush with the text block. However, I was almost out of paper, so I played the paper-cutting very safe, which gave me larger end papers and covers.

situation caused by paper shortage (reusing test print pages):

By the time I got the covers trimmed close, it wasn’t physically possible to cut the paper all the way down, unfortunately. 

I wanted to have this strip of dark-blue paper around the spine, so the cover was made of three pieces (back cover, blue thing, front cover), first attached together on some scrap printer paper. I was concerned the cover would end up bending at  of the break, but it’s basically fine after endpaper glueing :]

Speaking of glueing covers to endpapers, I ended up with air pockets again? 

where did this scratch come from? not sure

???

Also, glue stains are very easy to pick up. Future note to keep a wet paper towel around.

Filed the edges of the cover in an attempt to straighten them, which semi-worked but [insert consequences of filing paper here] 

fuzzy edges (hoping they’ll wear down eventually):

I’m pretty proud of this though, especially on the text formatting. Paperback books are nice :]

P.S. I found footage of the text block + end papers from the background of another photo. featuring glue cap and paintbrush

[indefinitevoid]

bookbinding journal entry #2

I made a blank notebook with perfect-binding as a test run following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKojHFky150 

long post w/ details under cut:

I folded and ripped 11 sheets of letter-sized paper into quarters (5.5′’ x 4.25′’).

Each page has two fuzzy edges. All of the “long” fuzzy sides were put on the spine, and the “short” fuzzy edge was alternated back and forth on the top and bottom. This way, the outer edge was completely clean, and I could use it for alignment.

I aligned the pages and binder-clipped them. Then, I painted Elmer’s Glue onto the spine and moved the binder clips to that area. Around 3 coats; first one thin. I was impatient so I held it in front of a fan. I also took off the binder clips prematurely, and it seems that the middle of the spine naturally curves inwards.

I expected the glue to seep into the spine more than I wanted, but turns out that perfect binding does allow the book to open flat. This contrasts with glueing the spine on books with signatures. I suppose the shape of signatures just allow for more room for glue to seep in.

I wasn’t careful about being neat with the glue, so there were a ton of stains on the outside of the first/last pages. So I cut them off (pretty cleanly)/

I used some blue paper for endpapers and plain beige cardstock as the cover. Aligning the endpapers and cover together wasn’t difficult, but I ended up with glue pockets on the back. I kind of popped them, so the back endpaper looks a bit strange (see photos).

(can’t really see it in the photos lmao)

Like with hardcovers, I found once again that it is really important to put tissue/waterproof material inside the cover and press it right after glueing the end papers. The covers were warped for a bit, but they flattened out after drying.

Not really sure how spine stuff works, but the book stopped laying completely flat after I put the cover on. It’s interesting that the cover, while flexible, is what ends up giving the book pages that curved shape when they open. 

Also, I had zero problems with pages warping near the spine this time! Probably because using a fourth of a paper allows the grain to face the “right way”. Unfortunately, I’ll be using half-pages for future projects. Stay tuned for more updates on my issues with paper grain direction.

After that, I put some blue paper around the spine and cut the corners off. 

Notes to future self: put more glue on the spine next time b/c that outside blue paper didn’t attach super well. Also, corner-cutting is always better the second time, so start with the bottom.

More photos:

ok that’s all for now👍