Another ficbind down! This one I put together at the request of a friend. It’s one of her favorite fics for a pairing that really took over her brain real estate for the past 3-4 years or so.
When she asked for Something So Dear by forthesanityof1, I checked and it’s over 180k words. My longest ficbind so far. I had to work up to this one—got a few bookbinding projects done and then tackled this.
The title page is really simple and uses a lovely ornament by @cmdonovann that I got through the Renegade Bindery server, which has been such a wealth of resources. I slapped together the chapter ornaments myself, trying to work out a balance of flower and tattoo design (because it’s the whole premise of the fic).
Sorted out that pesky recto-verso problem, thank goodness.
I also had some fun figuring out how to build out the text conversations in the fic. I’ve been typesetting a lot since February and have employed a different strategy each time to denote texting. There’s some chat fics I like but constructing the typesets for those will be a… much later project. Compiled social media history stories are really cool to see and I want to do them justice. This one has just a few minor pieces of text in chat format, so I played with typesetting that.
The edges look chewed up because I tried to shave the textblock down to make it pretty and even on the side, but I was using a box cutter and didn’t realize the blade wouldn’t cut the full girth of the signatures. I had to flip it and things went poorly. Another bookbinding lesson learned! I still really like this one, it turned out very pretty. My friend will be getting this once I ship it off—I haven’t sent her pictures of it and she isn’t on Tumblr anymore. I hope she enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it and problem-solving all the pieces!