#bookbinding journey

[aley-nag]

Fins for my boyfriend

Another little project I used my Cricut for:

My boyfriend plays underwater rugby (and got me into it as well). So I decided to decorate his fins. It's cute how proud he is of them. Sadly one number is already gone. Maybe I have to look into different foil that will hold up better to the water and abrasion.

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Using my Cricut for other stuff

My father loves sweets and I love using my Cricut, so for Christmas I combined the two and created this:

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Mini Book/Bookmark

I wanted to gift a friend of mine a bound fanfic of her choice. But I didn't just want to write a coupon, so instead I decided to show off my bookbinding skills and make a mini book, that functions as a bookmark as well:

I had pieces of this beautiful paper that I normally wouldn't use for the cover, but I didn't plan to put a title on it anyway so it worked great.

The assembly is really quite the same as with every other book, just fiddlier, but also quicker. I glued the yarn to the spine and attached the bookmark ribbon. In hindsight I should have sewn it in, I don't think it will hold up so well.

Some more pics:

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Loooooong awaited project

Last year I put all bookbinding off till I finished the FTH project and because I kept running into problems there, my only other project got finished sooo much later than I hoped...

But finally here it is: An anthology of Sister's work. She writes beautiful, steamy fanfic in the Batman Fandom. They also read a little like detective stories and are quite dark, so I decided to name the project Gotham Noir.

I did three fancy new things: I had my own wingdings, to separate paragraphs:

I put the cover decoration over the entire length and it is also visible behind the endpapers:

And I tried my hand at a full cover picture for the halftitle:

It is okayish. The real quality is better than it looks in this picture, but not quite as good, as it could have been. I started and printed this, before I learned about vectore graphics.

I also mismeasured where to cut the bookblock, so the margins look off... I think that's the thing I am most unhappy with and I am very unhappy with it. It ruined a perfectly good book.

I love the cover color though.

I also tried a fourth new thing but it didn't make it into the end product:

I designed this with Canva. The black is done by the printer, because I could not find fitting black paper. This resulted in the color flaking off at the hinges though. I fixed it with a pen and it is almost not noticeable but keeps recurring and also only works with black. So this is not an option for future projects. I also found it too stark, dark and kind off ugly so I decided on the cover you see above. If someone has some ideas, please share!

Some more progress and end result pics:

Binding Details Body Text: Garamond, 11 Half Title/Chapter Heading: Gotham Womans, 20 Full Title: BAT MEN_G, 70 Word Count: 19.269 Pages: 290 Paper: publishing paper A4, 80g, 1,5x volume (from my friendly neighbourhood printer)

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Laminate Paper

For my last project I backed a marbled paper with normal endpaper to hide some ugly marks. This also works if your paper is too thin to be used as endpapers.

Leave the paper bigger, than you need it and the paper you will back it with even bigger.

Take note of the grain of both papers. They have to be the same direction.

Use a laquer bowl and paint roller to quickly, evenly and thinly put watered-down glue onto the pretty paper.

Put it to the backing paper, Take care not to leave folds.

Put it between two pieces of cardboard an into you press. If it's bigger than your press, do it in steps for 20-30 seconds.

Take it out and iron it. Put some silkpaper on top as to not leave marks from the iron.

Put it back into the press or under something heavy until it is completely dry.

It will curl a little into one direction, because the different papers have different expansion coefficients. This will not be a problem, it will settle down with time.

It will also be quite stiff. If you use glue based on starch and cook it for a really long time it might help.

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Fandom Trumps Hate Fullfillment

Last year I decided to participate in @fandomtrumpshate because I like the project and I was hoping it would motivate me to greater efforts and to bind more. The lovely @nagisachan1 won the bidding and wanted me to bind Men and Angels by @laora-ryn with their permission. I was unfamiliar with the fic itself but read quite a lot in the FMA fandom and it was a heartbreaking and really beautifully written story with an interesting anachronistic timeline. Go read it!

I tried a lot of new stuff with this one and because I wanted it to be perfect did a lot of tests beforehand.

The first big thing came with the formatting because I wanted both decorated edges and chapter images.

The edges are just watermarks in Word. This was almost easy, the most annoying part was, that I could not use .svg files, so this is not a vector image and the quality is not as good...

For the chapter pictures I used different types of clocks, because of the recurrent and important motive of time in the story. The .svg files got created with Inkscape. It is a little annoying and doesn't work so great with every type of picture, but I was quite happy with the results. The orientation inside the text is easy with a newer version of Word (I think starting at 2019). It let's you push it around however you like. You just have to narrow the edges of the picture as close to the visible part as possible and set some check marks.

Nagisachan also requested a more americanized style so I learned how to do the headers. This is not so hard if you organized your project like described in How To Make A Book by @armoredsuperheavy.

Printing and assembling went without a hitch.

Then I desperately wanted to have cool endpapers... (this made everything else sooo much more complicated).

I had this cool marbled paper that I thought was a good fit. Sadly the backside was quite dirty. So I learned how to back it with normal paper to hide it.

Sadly this color matched with nothing else already in my collection...

The other really new thing I wanted to try was the relief on the front. I did one test:

(Here you see the original color for the cover. This did not match well with the blue endpapers. But it would have been almost the same color as Ed's coat 😓)

It worked almost perfectly. I cut the pattern out of 1mm cardboard, glued it to the normal 2mm cardboard for the cover, and continued as usual with the linen. I used my folding bone to press the linen to the pattern. This resulted in slight marks.

Later on, my bookbinder friend advised me to just press it with some foam rubber on top. That worked a lot better.

Then I got the great idea to create a bookmark... I neither had the tools, nor charms nor the bands... So on my search went to get all the materials together. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it was quite hard. In the end, I was very happy with the result, though. And assembling it was really easy.

For the endbands I used the new technique I learned, because I think, they come out neater, even though I don't like that you can see the colored yarn inside the book.

I assembled everything and then really wanted to decorate the cover even more, so I designed some cogs.

(Nagisachan got soooo many pictures and style questions from me :DD I'm so glad she had the necessary patience to deal with me)

Now I just needed to find foil in that color, because the red with the blue really matched with nothing anymore. Especially after I decided to color the edges in a kind of coppery gold.

(Colors were my greatest enemy with this project...)

I found foil I really liked:

It was quite metallic and had a slight green shimmer to it. It was a bitch to weed though. I labored for hours over this motive. And it kind of frays a little... I think that is what I'm most unhappy with in this project. Everything else went really well.

But finally! It was finished and I could send it the long way to Nagisachan (It was also quite close to the deadline :DD My time management is really bad.)

This post is already really long, but I want to show off some end results, sooo:

OH! I ALSO decided to put protections on the edges! This was a new thing as well 😅

At last:

Binding Details Body Text: Garamond, 11.5 Half Title/Chapter Heading: Auld Magick, 48 Full Title: elemental, 28 Word Count: 56.333 Pages: 194 Paper: publishing paper A4, 80g, 1,5x volume (from my friendly neighbourhood printer)

[aley-nag]

Short little project, that took a long time

A whiiiile ago, almost when I first started this, my mother asked me to bind the script from her coaching training. Because she had already printed it I lumbecked it together and then let it lay forever.

Now it's finally finished

It's DINA4 and I did not have endpapers in that format. That was my foremost problem... and then I just had no drive.

The spine is made with linen. The green paper (retailer from hell send it accidently) is ultra thin and suffered some damage while being glued down and due to the application of the foil (the transfer foild stuck to the paper and I had problems getting it off, something to remember when working with thin, structured paper). I mostly used scraps, or stuff I didn't want to use otherwise (like this very ugly paper) but suprisingly it turned out quite well. She likes it, anyway.

The foil on the spine is flock foil and feels fuzzy. I wanted to try how it behaved and am really happy with the result :)

Look at it! It's pettable!

[aley-nag]

Endbands!!!

Endbands are gonna be the death of me, I swear.

In may I had a workshop where we could choose what we wanted to focus on and I choose endbands (don't ask me why. I like to torture myself).

I started with an endband that had more than two alternating colors. The trick is to just work in the new color as you would in the beginning. You have to do this every time you change colors. If your bands are quite small you have to do this very often. It also results in kind of a rug that's lining the back of your book. It's not fun and it takes forever (if someone has an easier way to do this, pleeeeease tell me)

First try, where I was still humble enough to choose wide bands and few colors...

Then I wanted to learn to do an endband that is "double-storied"(?). And because that was not complicated enough, I wanted to do it with five different colors. That resulted in this monstrosity and took me approximately 8 hours.

You start like you would normally do and you can glue the lower story to the spine. Then you have to add the second story and that one you can't glue down, because you need to wind the thread around it. You can kinda see the direction that it runs in the second picture. The knots on the front are the same. The threads that are hanging down are due to my hubris of changing the color after every loop. If you content yourself with two colors, you will not have that.

Behold the monstosity. It was very hard to glue all that thread down, but I managed. And I will never do that again.

After that I learned a very simple one, where you don't have the knots in the front, but you have to fix it to every section and you cannot glue down the core. But as I hate how my knots turn out, this will be my new go-to technique going forward.

Ignore how irregular the length is, this was an experiment. The beginning is quite fiddly, but after you connected the core to the bookblock it is relatively easy and the result is very even.

I also learned that because I favor dark colors I should dye the twine before I wrap it. Otherwise it will shine through if I leave even the smallest gap.

I also accidently used the same color scheme I was wearing that day :D