#k118

[spockandawe]

Okay! I have been busy. My god have I been busy. So, my little brother got married this weekend! Naturally, I claimed the right to make the guestbook. And also naturally, I dramatically underestimated how much work this was going to be. I have not known rest for the last month.

So, here's the exterior. Nice and simple and elegant!! Very straightforward!

Then, there's the inside. I was like 'hmmm, well, they met when they were working at a video game store together. And they still game a lot together and it's important to them. I know, I'll draw this thing like an illuminated manuscript!!'

Reader, this is where I lost control of the situation. This is where we come to the fact that I'll have to reblog this multiple times just to attach all the relevant images. I came up with eleven "main" images, eleven simple verso images so people wouldn't sign the wrong spot by mistake, two inhabited initials for the couple, and one demo page not included in the book directly explaining the concept for how the pages were laid out (spot for name + spot for message). I finished that last page uhhhh thursday. For a saturday wedding.

Before I get any deeper, i have to give MASSIVE props to the dobie draws 'codex pokemonus' illuminated manuscript zine. I highly recommend checking that link out, because it's a delight. I bought this thing, ohh... I'm not even sure. At LEAST half a decade ago. When i was gathering all my references and resources for this project, this was unquestionably the most helpful one. The influence is most obvious in the venusaur vines the pokemon pages, but it was truly, genuinely a LIFESAVER when it came to references for how hands and feet and faces could be drawn for little Creatures, and I'm so grateful. I would also like to state for the record that i learned medieval notation specifically to transcribe the jigglypuff song and that may be the detail that delights me most in this whole project

And since i have one spare image slot left, I'll also throw in one of my verso images, as a teaser while i line up my next reblog

He's beautiful 😍

[spockandawe]

Here we go, a guestbook for my little brother's upcoming wedding! With the way bookbinding has consumed my life, my mother, unsurprisingly, turned to me and asked if I'd be willing to do the guestbook. Yes, of course! Handbound leather 3/4 binding, natch.

But I also am very bored by empty notebooks, and I also learned that the recommended number of pages for a wedding this large was like... twenty pages. If I'm paring leather by hand, the book is not going to be twenty pages. So I thought, and went back to my mother and suggested, 'what if each signer was prompted to draw the bride and groom?' She loved it. My brother has no idea, but I'm confident he'll love it to. He has no taste, and if my babiest brother forgot to constrain his eldest sibling, it's his fault if things run off the rails. When I asked what his wedding colors are, he said 'weddings have colors?' so any problems are on his head! 🤣

We're not a particularly artsy family, but we are a boisterous one! And it's the first marriage among his siblings and his fiancees, so things will be exuberant. And I wanted to set this up to be fun for participants and for the couple, while still generating an aesthetically pleasing book interior. I set out to find an antique woodcut-looking page frame, and ended up with a combo of editing one frame, tracing/drawing rose decorations from a different frame, and stealing some ovals from a third frame to incorporate and decorate to blend. That frame goes on the recto side of each page, with a banner for the name of the signer (and two smaller banners with the names of the couple, which i whited out). On the verso side, to add length to the book and avoid risk of bleedthrough, I traced some animal couple photos and dressed them up for a wedding. Now, i just have to make instruction cards for the guests and distribute them to the tables, which means i also get to come up with a bunch of silly demo photos, hahaha

I'm very pleased with how it turned out! And naturally, the finishing touch, this is why I was learning the k118 style, to have this nice pretty book that still opens BEAUTIFULLY flat for writing. This was a fun project, and I'm super excited to show it to the rest of my family!

[spockandawe]

Okay! I pinky swear that i am trying really hard to give myself a break, but I have a few wips i finally wrapped up and need to post. One! First up is Interregnum, by admiral_byzantium and DrMckay. This was a BIG boi, it was 200k, and I kept the font size nice and large, on luxurious thick paper so it came in at 700+ pages, but even then it was a thick 700+ pages.

I just rounded and backed mdzs, my arms weren't ready to go through all that again 😂 So instead I decided to test the limits of k118, my new favorite style. I rounded, sanded the head and tail, left the fore edge with a nice sawtooth (I like the effect a lot with the very thick paper), and then went in with a brown leather with a nice weathered finished that really said star wars to me. I added red duo bookcloth and finished it all off with pewter foil, to keep the binding classy but maintain elements of that sci fi aesthetic.

I had a really fun time with this! Some of the fonts and elements are ones I also used in my binding of jodorowsky's dune (hardigan and foglihten deh04 my beloveds), they really do it for me in balancing that retro feel and an overall effect that stil works for my modern sensibilities. And this thing is a MURDER weapon. I still haven't tested it to the k118 360 degree opening, but it gives me 180 degrees with no problem, even at this size!

[spockandawe]

Now. Here's the big project! I made a test notebook for once in my life, but I've never enjoyed making notebooks and I'm always chasing that sweet, sweet dopamine. So the test notebook was like... 90% in parallel with the actual book, just rehearsing each step real quick before I did it on the real thing. And what I did was a fresh binding of 'it's about the bones 👌' by @sunderedstar. I had a typeset file ready to go, I'm in the middle of relistening to the audiobooks, it was perfect! And then I zoned out and accidentally cut a whole cover's worth of leather and not just a spine and the whole project ESCALATED 🤣

First, the k118 binding went beautifully. I really do recommend it. It can be done with an oxford hollow to give you a breakaway spine, but I... didn't do that! I stuck to the old timey examples I've seen where it's a tightbacked style and, yeah, it still opens SO far, it's an absolute doll. The style is characterized by vellum strips on the spine used to attached the cover boards and give them the security and flexibility without added bulk. I got impatient trying to differentiate between PAPER vellum and ANIMAL vellum in search engines and just said screw it and went in with the paper vellum. I still have actual vellum getting shipped to me, but truly, the paper stuff worked amazingly. I'm not sure how durable it is, in terms of years of life, but if feels REAL good now. Also. Finally had a thematic excuse to use this beautiful lacquered paper.

I also remain very proud of my typesetting for this book. Warning that you can glean HtN and NtN spoilers if you read the text closely! But scope out that hand I subbed in for the emoji in the title, that's important.

Because now that I was committed to all this leather. Something I've been procrastinating on for MONTHS is learning how to properly tool leather. I have a set of brass stylus tools that ought to be up my alley! Freehand drawing was my first creative hobby of note! This interest dates back to like, fifth grade, and it was time to GO for it. So. I modified the ninth house skull to have some sick shades, made the IX on the forehead more scrawled and scratchy, and drew a skeleton hand over the art I used for the title page. I printed my lines and traced them through printer paper with unheated tools. This was extremely rad, but I couldn't stop there. The next day, I went back over my lines with heated tools, and the level of crisp was SO delightful. I'm still very new to this, still learning how these tools and the material even handle, but oh man. I am actively antsy to find the next project to do this for, this was SO much fun, I enjoyed it so much, and I love this book to pieces!

[spockandawe]

Another guestbook! I've never done one before just recently, but there were two on the line for this fall, haha. This one just went in the mail this morning, so I can now receive the blessed dopamine rush of posting!

This is a case where the couple wanted to create their own interior for the book. The title on it comes straight from them, and the volume begins with a fairy tale retelling of their relationship, which I think is just the SWEETEST idea. The guests will be able to sign after that, and then the rest of the space is for the couple to leave each other notes in the future.

I finally did made endpapers to beef this book up to make sure the endpapers were nice and sturdy, and it worked beautifully! I don't know why I struggled and gave up every other time I tried them, haha. This is another k118 for opening flat reasons, and ahh, even paper vellum feels delicious to handle, but vellum vellum is REALLY next tier. The endcaps are leather, matching the spine, and I'm stoked about how well I was able to shape the endcaps around them! Oh, and the cover is blue-black color shift duo bookcloth. I'm really pleased with how this whole project turned out!

[spockandawe]

Two books to share today! One is a cute little notebook, done as a text case for the k118 binding style. It's a historical style that isn't common, but, spoilers, I'm in LOVE. Apparently you can do this with an oxford hollow, but I didn't! Without the hollow, it gives you a tight back, which usually makes books kind of stiff (casebindings and modern hardcover books usually incorporate some kind of breakaway spine), but this opens ALL the way. This was done with scrap offcuts for paper and boards, and was also a test for this printed leather, but I had a lovely time with it!

[spockandawe]

Two more books squeaked in under the deadline before I had to do nonsense like ""unplug my printer"" and """"stop doing crafts for two seconds oh my god"""" for my move! I did a guestbook earlier this year where the couple wrote the story of their relationship as a fairy tale at the beginning of the book, before leaving space for guests to sign. And now, I did two miniature versions with just the stories, as gifts for the parental units!

The materials and design choices are still the same, and much lime how with interregnum I was flirting with the upper limits of how thick I want to go with k118, here I was flirting with the lower limits, haha. It was a great learning experience! The contents and titling are resized a bit to fit the smaller size of the new books, but I had JUST enough of this hide to match the leather exactly, so the three volumes should make a really cute matched set going forward!

[spockandawe]

Then, the book I've been making for the last two days! I was looking for a fic to use for an experiment, and just as I was casting around, blackkat's 'efface the footprints in the sands' wrapped up. This was SO perfect, this was the fic that completely sold me on agen kolar and I was SO excited to make it into a book

As a refresher, the k118 style is a tightbacked binding where the boards are attached with vellum hinges (still vellum paper for me for now, while I wait for pakige), and it's classically covered with leather. As a tightbacked style, the covering material is glued to the spine of the text block, but when you open it, you can touch cover to cover. I didn't test that yet, it's still damp, but I got 180 degrees as easy as anything!

I would use a different fabric the next time I do this. I forgot until it was too late to go back that this bookcloth wrinkles like WHOA if you get it wet and reposition it, but that's... how you do the turn-ins on the spine for a style like this :p But it still worked well ! And I chose these hand-marbled endpapers (not by me) first and this fabric was the perfect match. It's hard to photograph the color shift, but the way the fabric and paper go together at the turn-ins works BEAUTIFULLY. All things told, a very successful experiment!! Definitely something ibwant to repeat in the future!