a bind i did for @kithmet's buddie fic something touched me (like a knife blade) that reached her in time for her birthday tomorrow! (although this is my own copy; chrissy received the better version with less mistakes).
this was the result of all my experiments with cutouts in 2024, and after finishing this bind i truly never wanted to do a cutout again. still holds. there wasn't a central motif for the fic, so i just experimented with things that reminded me of the fic and sections of her prose, which mostly goes together. the title page is a poppy illustration (a thematic choice of poppies being california's state flower, eddie leaving and then coming back, of course); the chapter pages are various celestial objects. playlist and cover by chrissy <3
this bind is 8 months old but still one of my favorites <3 and thank you chrissy from writing the best post s7 buddie fic that led to us being friends <33
After the massive chonker of my last bind, I wanted to do something simpler and less complicated. And there was one fic that is in my to-bind list that is both short and sweet to typeset: your half of the ransom by @definitelynotshouting.
Buuuut trust me to not do some experimenting, even now.
Also, apologies for the terrible lighting. And for adding glue to the spine which resulted in the ripping at the gutter for the title page. Oops.
As a fan of the Life SMP Series, I always wanted to bind something from Secret Life but kept it off due to other projects coming to the forefront. Well, that list is cleared! Time to do justice to the marooned GoodTimesWithScar and his empty sunflower fields!
I have done many a sewn-boards binding, but I wanted to experiment to see if I can make one for a single signature / booklet. If this is successful, I can use this to bind and embellish really short fanfics and even zines into proper books, with endpapers and hardcovers and even a nice spine!
Not only did my experiment turn out well, It has made me want to search for more short fics to turn into proper hardcovers!
I also tried another experiment with applying fanart and prints. I have pasted artworks onto book pages before, and they always end up either warping or waving from glue moisture. So this time, I only dabbed glue onto the top edges of these images and pasted them onto the beginning and last pages of the fic proper.
Verdict: they don't warp and are freely flexible, no stress onto the pages or spine! (yay!) But their bottom free-wheeling corners like to wedge themselves against the opposite pages next to the gutters, making them a danger for creasing and wear (nay!)
Special thanks to @definitelynotshouting for writing this fic and to @l3o-draws for her permission for me to use her beautiful Secret Life Scar fanart for this fic! You both are amazing!
Kill your darlings by MesserMoon, a fantastic fic you could read at AO3 for free.
I love this story, and am happy to have it in my collection. That said, I can tell you that this binding was very eventful.
I think I will change my name to Not Perfct bindery. The two volumes of this book took me a long time, because I was buried in workload. It seems that every day I picked up this binding project, I made some mistake. The worst one was sewing the signatures too tightly so it was impossible to round the spine. Another mistake I made while cutting the fabric, as can be seen, the covers were in different proportions.
This is my 60th binding; and I must learn that in excess of confidence lies the danger.
hey everyone! now that i've finally made some measurable progress, i wanted to share with y'all that i've recently picked up bookbinding as a hobby!
my first bind is of my recent one piece oneshot requiem for lab rats, a what-if character study & action fic for if king fought sanji instead of zoro during the raid on onigashima. that fic is my BABY, truly my pride and joy, so i thought i'd be a good place to start.
here are a few snapshots of the typeset! above is the inner cover & quote page, and below i've shared some of my favorite interior spreads -- there are 21 (very painstakingly cleaned, redrawn, spliced, and edited) manga panel illustrations throughout the typeset. can't wait to share more once it exists as a hard copy, and i'll post the completed typeset for free download once it's finished if anyone wants to bind it themselves!
(shoutout to @umbrace-rambles for drawing the fic's icon, a little angel lab rat with king's wings and a tail curled like sanji's brows <3)
read the fic here!
more page spreads below cut! (please look, they took me fucking forever.)
i adore the illustration on the last page, but alas, it's too much of a spoiler for the ending just in case anyone seeing this hasn't read the fic yet. hope you like these small previews! excited to go further down this rabbit hole and share my descent into bookbinding hell with you <3
i made copies of @cryptocism's fic frequency for a friend as a gift! (with author permission, thank you so much!) this was a very simple project that i made extremely complicated, but i'm very pleased with the final results! quarter(ish) bind with bookcloth on the spines and paper on the bookboards. i recreated the typography for the fic title from cryptocism's artwork, and really ran with the circuit board theme. so many glamor shots follow:
volume one has chapters 1-10. the colors and design of the cover are the same as bart's costume! i also wanted there to be some design elements that tied the two volumes together, which is why the titles are both in gold with the matching circuit pattern.
volume 2 has chapters 11-22, and i was worried about spine well (for both volumes) but there actually wasn't much! the colors are to match thad's inertia suit.
i sewed the headbands with embroidery thread, and am getting a little better at it. the bookcloth was made from cotton fabric, wheatpaste, and kozo paper as backing.
i originally intended on tipping in the artwork cryptocism made, about one piece per chapter and several comics, and had several textblocks with the art included but it unfortunately created a lot of spine swell (because i made it way more complicated). and then i ran out of this white paper and didn't want to reorder more for matching volumes. an example of what it looked like in one textblock:
also, i tried my best to sand the edges but it's only 20lb paper so they just kept fraying and fraying, so i bought a guillotine. life has been bliss since then.
[fonts used: jersey sharp for the chapter titles and POV titles. garamond premier for the body text, pixel operator for chapter subtitles (and i also used it for craydl's dialogue!), and lightning bolt for the section breaks which thankfully included a the flash bolt.]
After the monumental effort that was my last bind, I wanted to de-stress and do something less fiddly or time-consuming. Luckily, I have been eyeing a certain fic from the bowels of Disney Kink at LiveJournal from the ye olde time of 2012: Daddy's Little Secret.
It was my introduction to the wild world of kink memes and the premise was a head-turner: a Finding Nemo fic where Bruce the shark is a Sydney biker who is in love with Marlin and wants to be a dad to Nemo. You can't get a wilder non-NSFW introduction to kink memes than that! Perfect for a single-signature bind!
Never do multiple fanbinds at a limited time, folks.
Your grind will never end.
Why yes, I did watch Parkour Civilization. Evbo now shares my brain with so many other characters, and this fic caught my eye after stumbling upon a beautiful fanart of Mavbo that was drawn because of it. With work on other stuff piling up, I thought a short fic would make for an easy bind.
Ironically, I didn't think of making any idea on cover design until very very late. I originally wanted to make a Klimt-patterned cover to match the interior decoration (and the ending fanart), but I recently brought some Japanese mulberry paper that coincidentally have Evbo's colors! So I made the cover using that mulberry paper and fashioned the title and back strips based on Japanese aesthetics.
That, and because the title was too long to make it a beautiful horizontal label.
The end result is an exterior that looks visually different from the interior, but now I feel they complement each other.
The interior, though, was full-out Klimt.
I wanted to make the interior match the fic-fanart I saw that inspired this bind. Golden strips made out of Klimt patterns and paintings frame the text, while I chose an old-ish font (Doves Type) for the text. The drop cap was a product of experimental masking with more Klimt patterns with a font picture, and the entire shebang lies on top of paper that has a subtle Klimt pattern on it.
All in all, it took some brain-crunching to make the design and layout in a limited amount of time, but the end result was so worth it!
Special thanks to @oh-snapperss for writing the fic in the first place, along with @aofikofi for her fanart of it. And a very special thanks to @setacin for his incredible fanart of Mavbo that inspired me to design a Klimt-style bind for the fic! If only I had gold leaf to complete the style!
Before I start, let me just say: Ranchers! Scarian! Hermits and Life Series and Empires characters! Sheriff Jimmy! Sheriff Scar! Criminal Tango! the Wild West! Treebark and Ethubs!
RANCHERS. THE WILD WEST. CREEPING ELDRITCH HORROR.
Whoo, that was a rush.
I'll be honest; I think this book would have come out much sooner if not for my decision to add-in a whole lot of stuff into the text and pages. It got to the point that the original cover would have been a wanted poster at the front and a sheriff's report at the back!
I had to restrain myself, lest this book would never get finished at all. It's already been 59 days since my last post, and doing the original cover would have stretched the days even further. So I had to follow the mantra: Finished, not perfect. Besides, nothing says I can't make another version in the future...
From the moment I finished this fic, I knew it would become a book. But at 143,412 words, Dirges in The Dark by @twodiamondhoes would stretch my ficbinding skills to the limit and would be the second-ever bind that would reach past 250 pages (the first was an MCYT Sleepy Bois fic that predates this blog that I want to redo).
Eventually, the full typeset took up 520 pages! And as such, I finally decided to use extra support for the entire textblock. From an old pair of pajamas, I backed strips of fabric with glue and paper before cutting it into tapes, forming a crucial support for the various weaves along the spine. I then covered the entire spine in brown wrapping paper for even more strength.
For the title and headings, I scoured for and found several typefaces, dingbats, and vector graphics which really evoked the fic's Western and Gothic vibes. I also took some inspiration from fellow ficbinders in the Renegade Publishing group for the style of layout and formatting throughout the book, such as using faded images in the background of these pre-story pages.
I wanted the reader to be immersed in the Wild West from the get-go, so having such images from the start — before the story even begins — felt very appropriate. I tried to make them thematic to the information presented, like a singing cowboy for the music playlist pages, but I think I made the image too faint to be seen!
As for the chapter openers, I experimented with some layouts before finalizing on what you see: photos taking up one entire page on the left with the chapter titles and opening paragraphs on the right.
Just like my last bind, I want to make the reader feel immersed in the story and also bring out the mood of that particular chapter. This, however, led me to entire days of scouting and scouring stock photo sites just to find the right pictures for 11 different chapters. 4/10 would not recommend for sanity.
Given that the story uses a number of foreign words, old slang, and specific Wild West-era terms, I added a plethora of footnotes at the bottom of some pages for extra context and meaning.
I also wanted to be playful and make certain story parts, such as characters receiving letters and notes, really look like they're a part of the story. So I cropped old paper textures and fished out old fonts from the past to make them look as if they're actually there, pasted against the paragraphs!
More importantly, there were some specific parts of the fic that felt super important and I wanted to highlight these passages, especially the Deals made by the characters throughout their arcs. Given DiTD has a certain affinity with eldritch darkness, I decided to highlight such paragraphs by backlighting them against a band of pure black. Besides being thematic as hell, I made the bands have curved edges and decorative lines to add a certain western-gothic touch!
It was from this that I begin to think "what if I can color entire pages to convey the mood and setting?"
...Which led to the madness in these pages. I can't reveal too much because of spoilers, but there are certain times when the characters end up in situations where the very light turns to dark. Or they end up in hellish situations. Or the eldritch creatures began to speak.
It took some creative brainstorming to figure out how to show the mood of such scenes in printed pages, but I eventually figured out that I need find the right fonts, change their colors from black to white, and then change their backgrounds from white to dark to highlight them all! The power of formatting!
There's a lot more pages where I went wild with such shades and fonts, but I ain't revealing in public because spoilers!
But undoubtedly, this is the biggest experiment I have made with this bind. There is a certain part where Grian and Pearl spoke in eldritch R'lyehian / Cthuvian, and I want to convey the sheer strangeness of the speech and it's meaning. Something outside the box.
Luckily, I have an inspiration in fellow fanbinder @mythrilthread, who made an amazing fanbind that used vellum overlays to showcase the speaking of alien languages and what they mean in English. AND IT LOOKS SICK AS FUCK. When I finished reading Dirges, I knew I had to emulate this form of language translation, so I printed the eldritch speech, cut it, and pasted it onto the spine to give a similar effect of strangeness, and IT LOOKS SO COOL!!!
And lastly, I just had to include some of the amazing fanart made by readers into the book! All of these are placed by their corresponding text and chapters, and they all look so cool!
So I want to give a special thanks to @azzayofchaos, @leafdoodles, @hybbart, and @foxyola for granting their permission for me to include their incredible works into this bind! The dark shades and page formatting is one thing, but these works truly make this book feel so much more alive!
All in all, this bind was an odyssey in the making. I experimented with page formatting, layout wizardry, and bookmaking methods that I haven't tried before. While I know I could do better, I am beyond happy to see this work finished!
And once again, a thousand thanks to @twodiamondhoes / WixWrites for crafting an amazing story!
