AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Crying sobbing so so overwhelmed with love and gratitude because @perexcri gave me the BEST birthday gift ever??? She bound my fic a luminary, no one and I can't stop holding it <3333. She chose the most gorgeous celestial-themed paper for the cover, AND hand-painted the lighthouse bookplate, AND hand-wrote the blurb on the back?? AHHHHH
I'm just! It's so beautifully and thoughtfully made!! If this is what it feels like every time an author I love sees and holds their bound work, made physical, then I am never, ever going to stop fanbinding. My words, made real!! Tangible!! Gosh. This feels like magic. This is magic. Am feeling overwhelming love for fanfiction and fan crafts and communal art and friendship in this chili's tonight!
Thank you so so much for the best present ever friend AHHHH ilysm <333
This one has to be one of my favorite byler oneshots ever. it’s beautifully written, sweet, and a little bit sexy. It takes on Mike contemplating the end and what that means while also processing his feelings for Will. The religious themes in it are *chefs kiss*. I think it deserves more attention!
There is A Season- by ghostlin
Speaking of favorite fics. As I said I am the queen of opening and not finishing fics. This one I read in such a whirlwind I feel like I want to read it again just to enjoy the plot. It’s really beautifully written. The author has a unique way of creating atmosphere that makes it stand out in your head. An eerie nightmare with Will comes to mind, and one particularly funny scene with Dustin and Will as Mike is trying to express his feelings about El, or one beautiful scene where Will is laying under an oak tree with his drawings. It’s tagged “mike is dragged kicking and screaming into character development” and it doesn’t disappoint. It explores his coming to terms with his bisexuality and feelings for El and Will with wonderful depth and grace. Anyway, I just made myself want to go reread it and you should too!
closeface- by miketozier (smallcuts)
Some great Robin and Will interaction, Mike hounding Will about the painting, and some Mike jealousy. It skips around in the timeline and I enjoyed it!
kiss me dumb- by @endlesslytea
sometimes you just need a good fight and a kiss in an attic, amirite?
*if any of the authors mentioned are on tumblr and not tagged let me know!
GUESS WHOSE BOOK ARRIVED TODAYYYYYY SO NOW I GET TO POST PICS!!!!
This is To Hell and Back Again, by dear dear @perexcri. Cover design by @byierficrecs (thank you SO much for letting me use your design!). Binding by me!
I'm not in ST fandom, but I had the pleasure of skimming this fic while I was typesetting, and can I just say? I'm rooting for these kids SO hard. I'd go to hell and back again for them--[GUNSHOT]
But in all seriousness, Leah's writing is whip-smart, sincere, and funny as hell. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is a fan of these crazy kids. Her ao3 is a veritable treasure trove of excellent byler stories, which you should absolutely check out right now go do it!!!
As usual, process chatter and more pics, under the cut! <3
WORD COUNT: 144k
FONTS:
Title: Hellprint
Heading/Chapter Headings/Spine Titling: Norwester
C4 Summary: Roboto Condensed
Main Body Text: Garamond
COVER MATERIAL: Epson Premium Presentation Paper Matte, printed on my Epson Ecotank (more on that later baha)
HEADBANDS: Trebizond silk thread in the colors Garnet and Black
EDGE PAINTING: Acrylic paint in Crimson and Black
TITLING: Red iron-on foil for the text and white HTV for my maker's mark. Cut by Charlotte, my Cricut!
BINDING:
This was my first go at a German Bradel binding! I've seen lots of Renegade folks use this method and am so psyched I got around to trying it myself. I modified DAS's approach a bit and tipped on endpapers instead of sewing them in (there were a lot of new things to learn so I decided to shelve sewn endpapers for the next binding XD). I also only had 2.0 mm bookboard instead of 1.0 mm, so instead of layering two of the same boards like DAS did, I instead used one 2.0 mm board and one very thin piece of cardboard to create the groove for the hinge. The original article that DAS bases his video on actually uses boards of two different sizes too--a "thick" board and a "thin" board--but I still want to experiment with DAS's way of doing it, especially since I think it'll be easier to do cutouts on thinner board.
As far as matching the groove with the hinge, I think I did pretty okay for my first try! One board is definitely better fitting than the other though baha. There's always room for improvement, but hey that's where half the fun is anyway (and also you can't tell after the case-in whew), so I'm not stressed about it :D
COLOR SCHEME:
Nearly all of my design decisions for the color scheme were based off of @byierficrecs's gorgeous cover design! They were so generous in letting me use their cover and answering my questions about fonts, for which I can't thank them enough. And with so many wonderful elements to work with, it was so much fun to tease out the elements I loved from their work!
I decided to keep with the theme of red/black, which I also thought was fitting for a ST fic set largely in the Upside Down. Thus, black painted edges with red vines, as a kind of inverted, "upside down" continuation of the cover:
Even the thread I used to sew the signatures is red/black! :3 (please also ignore how the picture of the textblock is not focused on the actual textblock ajsldkfjs it was very late when I took that photo)
COVER PRINTING:
This was my first time printing a cover on my new printer (!!!), and BOY oh boy was it an adventure. Figuring out the dimensions took a second, but not as long as it took me to figure out what settings produced something I was happy with. Behold, all my test prints:
Very long story short, let's just say now I understand why being a prepress color specialist is literally a career you can have in publishing LOL.
Also, for some reason I could only sometimes get the bleed to work? Basically what I ended up doing was painting over the parts where the design didn't quite extend over the turn-ins, using with the same black acrylic paint I used for the edges. You can see this more clearly in the photos I took of the groove, and the endpapers covered the messy bits when I cased in:
THE MAIN INGREDIENT: LOVE
Finally!! The most important part of the process!!! HI LEAH ILY!!!! This fic is special for a lot of personal reasons, but chief among them is LOVE!!!! Your A/N's made me tear up when I first read it, because AH! You read my words of love!!! And went and wrote hundreds of thousands of your own words of love!!! And now I hope I've given that love back once again :3 And on and on we go, ad infinitum, until we are relieved of the curse of literacy and greet whatever comes after all this, thanks be to Todd. But until then, I'm so glad I get to shoot holes out of bagels and scream about radioactive tumblr posts and cry over fake people with you, friend :] Truly, peace and love on FUCKING Planet Earth. We are making it and we will all go together when we--[ANOTHER GUNSHOT]
I'm so excited to see where we're going, and what other stories we have to tell. But for now: EEEEEEEE YOU WROTE A BOOK!!!!!!!
