"Wen Xiao had supplied a surprising range of documentation. Some of it was rather florid poetry with a lot of barely comprehensible metaphors. Some of it was anatomical illustrations. Some manuscripts purported to be accurate historical accounts, and several were straight-up pornography with no pretence to literary style."
a fanARTifact book based on this brilliant fic by @achray1
My first fanARTifact in a cdrama fandom and I'm in love with it. It came together far easier than most of my projects do. As always, see pics and read more below.
So, I have always seen these accordion style books in cdramas, usually covered in book cloth and often given to the Emperor, but it wasn't until I watching Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty, that I saw these gorgeous wooden ones and lost my actual mind. I swooned and immediately saved them in my For Future Reference Folder of Doom.
It's not a surprise that I have been absolutely OBSESSED with Fangs of Fortune for the last few weeks (sorry non cdrama friends) and reading achray's amazing story fueled me to finally give this a try. It wasn't until I was writing this post and re-reading the fic that I realized she said scrolls and I should have tried making a scrolllllllll, aiya. There's always next time.
My wonderful husband - always one to encourage my fannish behavior - kindly took time out of his day yesterday to cut, plane, sand, and round these covers out of a piece of walnut he had lying around. He made them bigger originally and I thought they should be trimmed down a bit. I admit he was right and I should have left them larger. Ah well, next time. As per usual with these projects, I did do the research to check if walnut trees are native, or at least grow in China, and thankfully they do so moving right along.
The ones in the picture above were clearly stained and likely shellac-ed, but I only oiled mine (again with walnut oil), and pressed them over night to soak up any extra. Just look at the difference after they'd been oiled holy hell!
I experimented with quite a few ideas for attaching the text: vinyl, carving it out (no. omg. no. Carving walnut is a nightmare. I know that now), gold foiling. But I finally landed on calligraphy on paper and then adhering it on the cover like the reference image.
I went back and forth and round and round trying to decide what the cover should say. My initial thought was to translate Achray's entire fic title but that ended up being way, way too much text. So after talking with a discord friend and a lot of thought, we landed on "妖性爱习俗", which *should* translate to "Demon Sex Practices/Customs" or "The Practice of Demonic Sex" which comes from this excerpt in the fic:
"She shook herself, and stood up, mentally running through a list of all the texts— literary, historical, and medical— that she thought might or did describe demon sexual practices."
To do the text, I input the characters into a Chinese Calligraphy generator to use as reference. I don't own a brush capable of those gorgeous points, so I drew out the shapes and the followed the reference to fill them in. I did this a few times because I first made it way, waaaaay too big for the cover. I unfortunately decide to use a water based ink which, spoiler alert, will come back to bite me in the ass later.
See that bleeding. Yeah. That's my poor choice of a non waterproof ink, very thin calligraphy paper, and wheat paste asthe glue. Which I somehow didn't notice when I was doing the test on my extra board.
I decided to try out making wheat paste for the first time with this project and while I really did love the ability to remove and move around the piece you're gluing, it did not like to be stuck to the lightly oiled piece of wood so I decided after I redid the calligraphy on slightly thicker watercolor paper WITH waterproof ink, I would just stick with the tried and true PVA glue.
Lovely folks helped me decide between upper right hand corner or center placement and I'm really happy with the decision.
The inside is a torn down to size piece of an 22 x 30 Arches cold press 90lb watercolor paper, because with all my fanARTifact projects, especially the books, I like them to be usable objects in the end. I was SO fucking careful with my measuring and scoring and folding with this project y'all and I think I deserve a cookie.
I only used one piece folded up because I wanted the book to be able to remain flat/closed when it's not being used, but I think when I try this again, I will maybe try two pieces? Who knows. Certainly not me.
After all the stress of the calligraphy and the glue experiments gone wrong, it was finally assembled and put in my press with copious amounts of wax paper to protect everything.
In conclusion, this was a hell of a fun project and maybe the fastest I've ever seen a fanARTifact come together from start to finish. But I suppose one of the good things about learning all these new skills from each one of these projects will just make them come together easier (???) each time. I would love to get a nice calligraphy brush, some Xuan paper, and some ink and an inkstone to try a project like this again in the future.
I also want to try a scroll (which this should have been), stab binding, AND dragon scale binding. But, ya know, one step at a time yadda yadda.
Thank you, @achray1 for writing such wonderful, inspiring fics. And as always, if you made it to the end of my long ass posts, you deserve a cookie. 💛
"I do it because I want to protect him from the world, and sometimes from myself. I want to tell him every secret I ever had, and yet I never want to make him choose, to see the hurt in his eyes, to put this, too, on him. I want-I want so many things. Sometimes, I just want."
Turning The Page by @queerofthedagger / art by @schweetheart
I started this fanARTifact in July 2021 and finally, finally finished it in September 2024. Click below to see so many more pictures and read probably too much about the project.
This project was a LABOR OF LOVE because y'all...I failed so, so many times during the making of it. I had grand dreams of all the things that I was going to do and learn and every single time I tried something it was like the universe telling me to go ahead and go fuck myself, we're not doing that. But it's done and I'm pleased with it. I hope Mona and Schweets are. Let's talk about the process.
I read this story back in July 2021 when it came out and immediately wrote @schweetheart on July 23, 2021 to ask if I could use her art for the back because it was such a crucial part of the story.
She graciously allowed me to use it, and even sent me a high res file so I could have the portrait of Arthur printed on art paper.
THEN. My brilliantly stupid self decided that just making the book wasn't enough. I mean, I had already done that for Arthur's journal back in 2020 and I am nothing if not a nutter about learning to do new things, especially for my fanARTifact series.
SO. I'm going to learn to make paper. Yeah. Totally a reasonable escalation in terms of new skills, right?? ......... Nope. I bought a small 5x7 mould and deckle to practice with and some cotton linters to make the pulp. Twas. A. Failure. I didn't have a press or the felts or the sizing needed to make the paper actually, ya know, usable. This was the first time I put the project down for a while.
Moving on to another new skill in late 2021, I decided that I wanted to make the walnut ink myself. Luckily, I was part of a pigment subscription in 2020 (that is a hell of a nerdy statement, even for me) and had all the supplies in my art studio to attempt this endeavor.
I didn't fail this part! Fucking huzzah for small miracles. Now I had two small bottles of black walnut ink to use for the calligraphy that I wanted to do for some of the excerpts. Except now I was stuck again on the paper making part so I put it back down again for an eternity.
Picking it back up in late 2022, I asked Mr. Highlynerdy to make a custom size mould and deckle for me so I could have long pieces to fold for my signatures. It was his first time doing anything like this but he's a buddy and a pal and gave it a try. Surprising no one if you've read this far, we both failed this part. Even now, I'm still not sure we succeeded but eventually we did get something workable. And considering professional mould and deckles cost in the hundreds of dollars...yeah, it'll do.
It took a hot ass minute for me to feel ready to attempt the paper making again but once I was ready, I ordered wet, pre-beaten pulp from Twinrocker. A very curt man on the phone helped me figure out what I needed and added internal sizing to the pulp I ordered. I didn't take pictures of any of the paper stuff because it was very messy and annoying. Once again, Mr. Highlynerdy helped me rig up a drying box with tri-wall cardboard and ratchet straps and a box fan. Once the paper was dry, I used a gelatin mixture to paint on external sizing. Since I'm primarily a painter, I needed the paper to be able to handle ink, paint, pencil. Sizing paper is the only way to do this, but no worries, I won't go further into the nerdy details about this.
Once the paper was ready, I decided to sew the text block. Here's another part where I failed YET A-FUCKING-GAIN. I talked before on Arthur's Journal post about how books were very, very rare in the 6th century (Arthurian period), but BBC Merlin is soooooo anachronistic that it's fiiiiiine to just do what I wanted. HOWEVER. I did want to try to do visible spine binding. But. Unfortunately I had gone ahead and used all of my paper to bind the text block as if I was going to case it in. FUUUUUUUCCCCCK. It's fine. We're fine. Come on, brain. What can we do.
Well, what we CAN'T do is use a piece of leather from my large remnant that I bought for my first journal because someone - FUCKING ME - measured and cut the last piece NOT TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THE WIDTH of the text block. So now it doesn't fit. And refusing to buy a new piece of leather I'm forced to pivot once again.
I decided to cut the leather spine even shorter, buy some wood pieces and sand them, paint them a matte black, and then glue the leather to those pieces. Cool cool cool. We're moving on. I tested a lot of different glues for this and good ol' super glue ended up being the clear winner. Cue putting this project away again for a whiiiillle.
In October 2023, I decided to pull it out again and do the calligraphy and drawings I wanted. This story has so many gorgeous parts but I finally decided on the first page, the last page, and the page about Gaius.
I mixed my handmade walnut ink with my beloved Finetec gold and used the quills I bought from John Neal Booksellers to practice my Uncial. I shouldn't have been rusty after lettering an entire fic for this fanARTifact, but I was.
The little dragon was inspired by medieval manuscript dragons I found.
Narratively, I loved the idea that Merlin's writing would start off soft and delicate and become stronger by the end of the journal. Also, I loved that the end word "WANT" would be just gold because the ink blend changes throughout. Something magical or whatever.
This part needed tears. They might have been real ones...
Annnnnnnnd, the project was put down again until a few days ago when I decided, after getting back into Merlin fic, I needed to buck up and finish it.
I did so many tests for the cover. I tried embossing, carving, and debossing and hated all of them. I settled on painting it with acrylic paints in the shape of a Celtic knot sort of pattern. I originally wanted to do a triskelion but after reading a bit about how some asshole groups have co-opted the symbol for shitty purposes, I decided against it. It's a mix of black and gold and it's hard to capture the depth of it through photos...eh, I did what I could.
Still. Something wasn't quite working with the brown leather and the black covers with the new symbol so I broke out my matte black leather paint and decided to go all black.
All I had left to do was glue in the text block and it would be done! And that still took me a few days to work up the courage. The book opens nice and flat, which will be good for me as I will use it as a sketchbook.
Sitting here, on September 1st, I have completed a project that taught me many new skills and also taught me a lot about humility and perseverance. There was no way I was going to abandon this project, and maybe I should have started over many of the times, but I am quite in love with the final result and I just hope that it does it's inspiration proud. Thank you @queerofthedagger Mona for all you create and share with the Merlin fandom, and thank you @schweetheart for allowing me to use your gorgeous art.
Also, you may see quite a few other fanARTifacts in this photoshoot because I will use any opportunity to show them off lol.
If you read to the end of this, you deserve a cocktail and a cookie. Thank you. 💛✨✨
Keeping up with the accountability to post my projects here and hope it helps me finish them up! This one has been in progress for almost as long as the last fanARTifact and it is very much time to finish it up. Ffs, I learned how to make ink AND paper for this project. So yeah. It's been a lot lot lot of work and I'm ready to show it to the author and the artist of this fic. 💛
"Aithusa has seen her father's mate in his memories and smelled him on her father's skin when he comes to visit, but this is the first time she gets to meet him for herself."
Nepenthe and Lavender by @0hheytherebigbadwolf
My latest fanARTifact is an entirely handlettered, handbound, and illustrated book of this beautifully fluffy fic (and it has actually been in various states of progress since March 1, 2021.) More below the cut!
So as I said above, I actually started planning this fic over two years ago. Which, yeah, I don't really want to talk about because adhd is a hell of a thing. I love love love this fic (and this entire series) and I was inspired by The Black Hours and other gorgeous manuscripts with metallic on black paper.
I ordered some black paper from Canson for the text block, used Arabic gold finetec paint mixed with water and gum arabic as my ink (I used three pans of the gold paint...), and a Nikko G nib with a straight pen holder for the calligraphy. I really wanted to use one of my broad tip nibs, but I just couldn't my Uncial letters small enough with it. I used Uncial since that was technically the alphabet/font they used in the Arthurian time period.
The paper was cut down and folded into signatures of three and then I drew out light pencil lines for the text and for the margins. Every single letter was done sooooo slooowwllly because if I messed up on one page there was no way to erase it, which meant I would have to do basically four pages worth of lettering again since they were all connected.
And I did mess up.
More than once.
I think the most heartbreaking mistake was at the very end when I was trying to erase my pencil lines and I just ripped a page completely in half. The tears were real, folks.
Once I finished lettering - which took hours and hours and hours over many weeks - it was time to assemble the text block and sew it. I used gold silk thread I had leftover from Arthur's scarf (which is also used as the backdrop for the photo shoot) to sew the block together and I love how it gives just another little peek of gold to the book.
I painted the end papers in a vaguely floral pattern with the same gold and also some silver finetec paint, glued them all together and put them in my book press and then promptly didn't work on it again from October 2022 to July 2023. Sigh.
But once I committed to getting it done, I asked @swanfloatieknight to help be my accountabilibuddy and make sure I finished it this week. I tested out so many different cover designs, from fabric and thread, to paper, to finally settling on this all over design done by my cricut. Historically accurate?? Nah. I'm about as historically accurate as BBC Merlin.
I tried my hand at gold foiling and that was a disaster so I just used a gold silk ribbon to give the color a little bit more color. Once it was bound, I painted in a triskelion and Aithusa on a double page spread I left intentionally blank.
And it was finally done!
All in all, I'm pleased with how it turned out. Was it an exercise in patience? Yes. Did I learn a lot? Also yes. Mostly that handlettering an entire fic is madness and also this is far too small to case bind, but I'm a stubborn ass and it was happening regardless.
All total, I probably worked on this for about 50+ hours. It was most definitely a labor of love and I'm so happy that it's finally done.
Thank you for inspiring me to take on such a project by writing such wonderful fics, @0hheytherebigbadwolf! And thank you for everyone who reads these long fanARTifact posts. 💛
A fanARTifact idea in progress. I have always wanted Bilbo's vest from the first Hobbit movie but I could never find the right vest, or even the right fabric, I wanted commercially. So, I'm doing what any ADHD creative would do and making it 1000% more complicated by dyeing and sewing it myself.
The fabric is 5.5 oz linen and I'm going to use the marigolds I grew last year for dyeing. I'm not sure exactly which swatch of these I'd most like to replicate. The pattern that I've chosen is Merchant & Mills Miller vest. I'm a bit anxious as I've never made anything so tailored and I am unfortunately burdened with a much, erm, larger chest, than Bilbo so I'll need to figure out some darts and do a mock up, but such is sewing. I'm putting this up here to keep myself accountable (and maybe force myself to put up the other fanARTifacts I've made in the last few months.
This post is to keep a running list and hopefully also to keep accountability.
1. Still working on my Merlin fic inspired book, but turns out making handmade paper to my exact specifications is a giant pain in the ass. And after two failures I just haven’t picked it back up again. I need to brave it again. I already have the leather and the handmade ink and actual quills to use for the illustrations. Be brave, Gracie! You can do this!
2. Merlin’s purple shirt. I have the gorgeous linen material but I’m finding it absolutely impossible to source woad I’d need for the blue part of the natural dyeing. I have been looking into lichens that would have been available in the middle ages in Europe because those were sometimes used for certain purples (thank you whoever recommended that to me), but those are also hard to locate. So I may have to put that on hold or just be okay with dyeing it with my modern dyes and doing the hand sewing for the historical accuracy part. This one isn’t going to happen. I can’t find woad and it’s too late in the season to plant it this year if I wanted to grow my own.
3. Dijun Booklet. This is mostly just me learning how to do the Chinese stab style binding and sourcing either rice or mulberry paper as would have been historically accurate. And also learning how to do the brush calligraphy needed for the Chinese characters.
4. Dragon Scale/Whirlwind binding for some kind of project I dunno exactly what yet. This kind of binding is so very, very outside of my skill set but I am so super intrigued by it. If you’ve never seen it, here are some examples. This is proving a research challenge because I can’t find many actual descriptions of how to do it. But that’s what experimentation is for??
5. Bilbo’s handkerchiefs. FFS, these have been done since LAST MARCH but I just haven’t had the energy to style a photo shoot for them. Need to do that. Someone tell me to do that. They are done! Here’s the link.
6. Middle Earth tea blends. This one is going to be a lot of illustration work and then the tea blending but I have everything to do it. Just. Need. TO DO IT.
7. Triple Goddess Box that I made for last year’s ACBB with @tehfanglyfish. Again, just needs me to finish the velvet lining and take pictures. Why am I the worst?
8. Red Robe inspired by WKX’s Ghost Valley robe. I have the material (linen instead of silk because I’m not a millionaire), (nope, I picked up some red rayon to try and it’s been a nightmare), the pattern I’d like to use instead of trying to make a more traditional style hanfu, and the psych to dye, hand sew (dyeing no longer required, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to machine sew it because this stuff is really drape-y), and embroider...which should take the next five hundred or so years.
Holy $%#@! That’s a lot of projects in various stages of done-ness. I’m going to be using the next few weeks (months?) to try to wrap this list up. If y’all see me thinking about starting a new one please bap me on the nose with a newspaper, okay?? Thanks.
But wait...there’s more. Edited July 9, 2022
9. A little handmade bunny inspired by this super adorable art. Pieces are colored correctly, cut out, and ready to sew. Just have to put them together and figure out the radish.
10. An outfit inspired by this fic that sounded so freaking great! The fabric just got here today and has been pre-washed and dried. I have the patterns ready and I just need to measure and cut and start sewing.
I made my own ink for my next fanARTifact project. Because why not??
The black walnut clothlets came with my Ground Bright pigment subscription from last year. It’s a little bit lighter than I was hoping for, but I’m pleased with the result for my first time. And I think it’ll be fine for the project.
Ended up with about 20 ml of ink.
The book is one I bound with Strathmore drawing paper. And the quote is part of a Richard Siken poem. Because, again, why not...
My amazing friend was kind enough to model Arthur’s scarf from the fanARTifact project I did for @schweetheart ‘s brilliant fic. I was quite happy with the staged shots, but these photos show how big + cozy the neckerchief actually is! Click the links if you’d like to read more about the project.
