From @renegadeguild ‘s 2025 6th Renegade Bindery Exchange made for @bluejayblueskies of their delightful fic True Love’s Something!
This book was a ton of fun and had a number of new challenges for me!
The fic is a Shrek AU, so I went for a sort of fairytale vibe on the interior to match the storybook opening of the Shrek movies. Only, while I was redrawing the storybook page openings (so that I had them in a higher resolution) I tweaked some details to better match the story/characters ;)
The challenge I faced with these lovely storybook pages however, was that the paper weight that I use was a touch too light and the illustrations showed through slightly on the reverse page. Which wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if the gold gilding pen that I purchased wasn’t oil based and didn’t bleed through to the back side of the page…
Sadly I didn’t have any higher weight paper on hand so change of plan involved tweaking my typeset so that each illustrated page had a blank backside to it. Then I tipped the edges of the pages together. And then I tore the faux deckled edges into the book. All of which had to be completed only after the text block was sewn, because some of the signature middles landed on those blank middle pages. 😭
Suffice to say the construction order of this book was one big puzzle that had me doing this the entire time
However! I am so, so pleased with the results! This was my first time attempting faux deckling like this, as well as my first time doing interior gilding! Also my first time doing a proper laminated dust jacket! (Which also had gilding woo!)
Speaking of, the design of the dust jacket is one I especially love! There’s a gorgon character within the story and another character that often mentions their beloved strawberry patch back home so it was only befitting that I combine the two for the cover! (Slightly stylized of course, and yes I know you wouldn’t be able to see the snake tails if they’re relating to a gorgon but hush.)
My one regret with this book that I didn’t catch in time (before I had already sent the dustjacket for printing), is that the spine text is the wrong direction 😭 Every book I almost make this mistake but catch it in time, and this was the one time I failed that. 😔 Alas.
But can we talk about how well those endband colors match the endpapers and cover???? 👀
Materials: Cover bookcloth is Cialux in 1521 Maroon with a small amount of Siser Metal Gold HTV on the front. Dustjacket is made using Staples’ poster print service on 6.8 mil thick paper type then hand gilded with Sakura Pen-touch Calligrapher gold pen (very pretty results, somewhat finicky to work with) and laminated (with a large lamination roll as opposed to the individual sheets you usually find - so as to avoid seams). Endpapers are Black Ink Florentine Print Decorative Paper - Portofino. Bound using linen thread and archival pva glue, endbands sewn using single strand embroidery thread in a faux-double core style. Printed on Hammermill 20lb cream paper.