WIP Dry Heat/ Cold Rain/ Green Blade - altersuperego
Part I
More pictures and descriptions under the cut
New WIP that’s going to be a birthday gift so I’m not naming it properly just yet.
This post is a bit of a jumble, Sorry for that. I think I wrote quite a bit about some of my processes already though, so this one is partly about stuff I have not written about yet and partly about things particulary concerning this work.
After printing there was a lot going on that I wasn’t quite happy with. I am, however, even more happy with the result now as I might have been if the printing hadn’t required some adjustment.
For example the pages following the title pages showed through much more than I liked, so I added black Satogami papers, which now also mark off different sections of the book. I cut the paper to size plus 3-5mm to have a small ledge to sew through (the ledge is glued down to make sewing easier and keep the paper in place).
This time there are a few pics of my sewing process. I like to sew on Ramie band because it is so thin and can be easily spread out after moisturising so it barely shows after glueing the paste down down.
Historically entwining the thread while sewing the bookblock was done when books were not sewn on bands so those intersections connected the signatures and offered some more stability. Since the use of bands to sew on, it’s not really necessary anymore. I still like to entwine the sewing thread of the first and following and the last and previous signature to keep the thread firmly on the spine and my first and the outside signatures from slipping out too much when rounding the spine.
When guillotining the head and foot edge, I place the book on a cardboard an to protect the shoulders from getting squashed by the pressure of the guillotine (you can see another cardboard construction with one rounded edge on top of the bookblock). I also fill up the front edge (which was guillotined before rounding the bookblock) with some scrap paper or maculation to keep the uper pages from fraying. I think next time I’ll also cut the paper to fill the edge smooth so I have a smooth edge to line up against the side of the machine.
Even without a professional guillotine I can only recommend to fill out the front edge of rounded books for trimming the head and food edge. Knives are made to cut against surface and the results will always be neater with a surface to cut against, than pushing down on paper in mid air!