sits-bound - Tumblr blog

[sits-bound]

I wanted to make my BFF something, and while she doesn't read fic, she does like to cook and go out to eat. Her mom hosted a lot of dinner parties and kept notes on them in her journals, which have become treasured keepsakes. So I designed this so she could start keeping track of her memorable meals.

I don't know what else to say here. The title font is Frontage, I foil quilled the cover. End papers are Ink Drops by Craft Consortium. I printed it on 24lb warm white paper.

I hope she likes it!

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My bookbinding tools and stuff

I started binding in July 2023, so I'm certainly no expert, but in case you're interested in what I use to create my binds…

I use Adobe InDesign to typeset and Illustrator for graphics

I print on an old Canon laser printer for black and white and an Epson ET-3830 inkjet for color

I purchase my shortgrain paper from Church Paper (for folios) and the long grain paper I use for quartos is just whatever (nothing special)

I love my punching cradle and guide that I got off etsy.

I use this thread (that I wax with beeswax) for sewing signatures

I love this cardstock for endpapers (Craft Consortium ink drops)

I like this bookboard (in black specifically)

I use these tools for spacing and squaring when creating covers

Everything gets stuck together with this glue. (GET THE POINTY TOP!)

I have an old Silhouette Cameo for cutting vinyl and applying foil to bookcloth (with this pen)

I use this foil quill for freehanding

I apply laser toner foil with this Scotch laminator

I have a thermal binding machine from Amazon and I use these glue strips with it

I have this guillotine (but I don't recommend black for visibility reasons)

I have purchased bookcloth from Hollander's, Colophon, and Amazon

Get this head and bond if you want to make your own bookcloth

I make ribbon bookmarks with charms like these and these crimps.

I get positive feedback and help and kindness from @renegadeguild

Caveat: These are just the tools and supplies I use. I am not an expert. I'm a hobbyist who is relatively new to it. Some of the things I use might be "wrong" but every book I've made works, so who cares?

If you want to see what it looks like when I bind something, here's a short video.

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Away Childish Things by @letteredlettered

I'm so excited to finally share this bind of one of my all time favorite fics! Thanks to lettered's generous binding policy, I decided to go all out.

This bind has a foiled cover and spine, hand sewn silk endbands, and thirteen custom chapter headers. It was also my first time rounding and backing.

You can find more pictures and information about my process under the cut.

For the cover and spine, I recreated the design of Beasts of the Field (1902) by William J. Long.

I wanted something that captured both the whimsy and maturity of the story, and this cover fit my vision perfectly. It also gave me the opportunity to recreate another antique cover from the public domain.

Unfortunately, the design was a bit complicated for my Cameo 4, so I was unable to fill the lines in. You can also tell that the foil did not adhere properly near the bottom, so the flowers are lighter than I would like them to be.

Because of the trouble I was having with my Cameo, I decided to foil the spine by hand. I deeply regretted this decision two hours later, and it took me four hours to finish foiling. My wrist still hurts!

Sewing the headbands was my absolute favorite part. I was encouraged to try them by a lovely binder on Instagram, and I ended up completely addicted. I splurged on some fancy silk thread so I could give this fic the royal treatment it deserves! I think they look like beautiful little caterpillars.

As for the rounding and backing... I'm not going to talk about it. Nightmare. Lots of nervous sweating. Emotional agony. Next topic!

I worked on the typeset back at the beginning of January when I had some time off, and it took me a solid week of obsessive editing to complete. My sister suggested that I use Harry and Draco's patronuses for the chapter art, but there unfortunately aren't many public domain illustrations of deer and foxes playing together.

It was at that point that I also decided that I wanted the animals to match the respective ages of Harry and Draco and the tone of each chapter. For the 13 chapters I ended up editing 25 different illustrations together. The bulk of these are taken from vintage versions of Bambi and Reynard the Fox. It's possible that a few stock images from 1980s nature books snuck in there, but I did my best to keep them all pre 1925.

I'm not a skilled editor, and some of these are worse than others, but I'm quite proud of what I was able to cobble together. On the final page I put a young fox and deer running off together. I wanted it to seem like Harry and Draco's inner children had been freed.

I'm a bit embarrassed to say that this bind took me about 4-5 months to complete! I started in early January, and went wildly off track learning how to round, back, and sew headbands. And then I was hit by some killer creative block that only lifted last week!

There are still many things I could improve on, but I'm so proud of everything that I learned and accomplished with this bind! A big thank you to lettered for inspiring me with such a wonderful story. <3

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i’ve been working on this since january. i’m both so fucking glad it’s done and also a little bit disappointed with it. i made my own book cloth and you can see where the heat n bond has seeped through the cloth bc it go too hot, the small spines i really should have thought of while making the typesets, and should’ve upped the font size to make it larger. i think i was so focused on finishing it that i maybe got a little lost in the details u know?

but anyway! i wanted to try my hand at the inspired by clothbound classics covers, and i’m pretty satisfied with how that came out! it was a lot of fun to decorate these with their charms on the bookmarks (my fav is the little tiny perfume on teenage wasteland. like how cute!! and tiny!!) and to try not to get too caught up in reading when i was editing.

i love all of these stories so much and i’m so excited to have made them all into physical books!

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this is the one. the most popular fic in the harry potter fandom. the fic that got me into fanfiction. the fic that i sobbed to for months after reading it.

i tried to bind this three separate times over the last two years and bro the first two sucked ASS. it was legit the very first fic i tried to typeset which is like, not the greatest thing to start off with LMAO. it looked funky, i hadn’t fixed any of the spacing, my footers didn’t match the text font or size. it was very much a baby binding.

the second one was my first time using a cricut and there is a very steep learning curve w the cricut, especially in creating designs that aren’t too complex or too plain. i tried to copy one of the popular printable book jackets and omg i spent weeks modifying my designs and printing and reprinting on my cricut and it looked like trash when i was done.

so finally, we have come to this.

i got really into quartos during the winter and was like omg the editing process for this would be so much more manageable if i broke it down into years! so then i did lol. it allowed me to customize each chapter into sections so i could add the chapter title to the footers, and break down graphics into separate years so i didn’t have 100 pages in one canva file. it was just a lot easier to feel accomplished having broken it down bc this fic is a MONSTER.

every chapter heading is the same - just the swirl. i gilded all the chapter titles using toner reactive foil and my laminator (she broke in the middle of this project. i ended up having to buy another laminator, and about 3 packs of foil from icraft. this is my most expensive fic binding to date🫠). i included the songs ms.kingbean put at the top of every chapter, and the bootleg tapes and christmas special.

i am seriously so proud of how this turned out, and can’t believe it’s actually done. sorry this is super long, but this really was a labor of love. they’re not perfect, i’m still really bad at measuring and cutting straight lines, but i’m satisfied. really satisfied.

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LA, Who Am I To Love You? by me 💕

finally got around to binding my @hd-wireless fic from last year! Faced some technical difficulties but I’m happy with my design choices & how they reflect the vibe of the fic! Featuring art by the lovely @babooshkart and a praise page with comments from @stationintern, @tackytigerfic, @sitp-recs, and @skeptiquewrites among others (all the comments on that fic gave me life! tysm 💕)

Materials:

Dupioni silk which I made into bookcloth for the covers

Fonts: Brim Narrow, Rage Italics (California license plate font)

HTV: Siser Holographic Vinyl (would not recommend from this experience, but also my tools are suboptimal so could be a me problem!)

shelf update 💕

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Bound: All the Young Dudes by MsKingBean89

Well THIS took a long time.

I started typesetting it months ago. It's so long with a lot of chapters, and a lot of details. At first I split it into three volumes, but one would have been way longer than the others, so I resplit it into four, which I like, but just made it take that much longer.

Compared to the typesetting, binding it was a breeze. I purposely did not put any color on the inside so that I could just print it out on my laser printer. I put that thing through a workout! I had to stop and let it rest quite a bit. Poor buddy. Everything went smoothly with the folding and the punching and the sewing. I had fun making the end papers.

So lovely and clean and straight!

And then.

Then.

See, I was going to sand the edges instead of putting it through the guillotine. I even bought a power hand sander a few weeks ago. I was going to embrace the sawtooth, just sand the top and bottom a bit.

But for SOME reason I decided to trim the edges and, well, that was a big mistake.

Nothing ended up square. Everything shifted while cutting. The best I can say is that no text got cut off in the making of these binds.

As I was creating the cases, I realized that the boards (which I also cut with the guillotine) were not square either. It was all such a mess. But in the end, the text blocks fit within their cases, just not squarely. So looking at the outside of the set, you'd never know they're all cattywampus inside.

Moony says they look fine.

Oh, lovely!

Well, let's take a peek at the inside, shall we? I'm going to put them under a cut because it's a horror show.

Well, the endpapers are cute.

Oh that's not so bad!

OH GOD

Moony does not like this, though.

What's a "square"?

So, there you have it. Sigh.

Fonts: Chapters and titles: Krifon Body: Miller Display

This was supposed to be a gift for a friend, but I'm going to make a paperback version next and let her decide which one she wants.

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Look at me go! Folded and punched, time to start sewing!

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Ok ok I printed. Now I have to fold all this?!?

This is gonna take forever.

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Am I mentally ready to start printing this? All four volumes? 1000ish pages?

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Bound: A Sword Laid Aside by Korleana

I was all set to make this a hardcover, even had it printed out in signatures, ready to fold and sew, but at the last minute decided to make a paperback. For no reason other than I hadn't made one in a while, and I had some legal-sized lamination sheets for the cover, and, well, because I can!

As I am wont to do, I picked one relatively small element from the fic and leaned in hard. This time, it was motorcycles.

This went together easily, nothing super notable (which, in my opinion, is a good thing.) One thing I'm extra happy about is that my guillotine didn't give me any problems. I think I'll need to change out the blade and/or get the existing one sharpened and I look forward to neither of those tasks.

This is a great tutorial on making paperbacks with a thermal binder, btw.

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Ok NOW my bind of Grounds for Divorce is done. It’s harder than you might think to find a lemon charm.

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[Podfic] Ship of Theseus (T, 1 hour, 46 minutes)

I adore this fic, have read it over and over again, but was always sad there wasn't a podfic of it by the lovely GallaPlacidia. Luckily, she has blanket permission, so I decided to record it. As of October 1, 2022, her works will no longer be on ao3, but this recording won't go anywhere.

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Well, it’s just as well I didn’t make any major changes to the text block for what was meant to be the author copy, because my guillotine went rogue and decided to set margins to “minimal.”

It’s ok, I can still read it. No missing words! (The first copy is going to the author.)

Bound: The Star Splitter by @oflights

If there is one thing I am not, it is patient. The minute I finished this fic, I ran off to ask the author for permission to bind it. I'm so happy I'll get to have this one on my shelf!

I spent a lot of time (for me, anyway) on the typeset. I wanted the chapter pages to be special but also was afraid that if I printed them in color, they'd bleed through (like what happened with The Man Who Lived.) But I didn't think I'd be able to fit the text block in my guillotine if I used a heavier weight paper.

Happily, I was able to use the heavier paper and the chapter pages and illustrations (by the absolutely incredible @littlewinnow) without any bleedthrough on the back.

I made the end papers with illustrations off pixabay and foil toner. Do I love them? Not as much as I wish I did. I may do something slightly different for the author copy. We'll see. (Mostly I don't love the color of the cardstock I printed on.)

So once I was happy with the text block, I had to think about the cover. I didn't want to do yet another navy book, so I almost went with black, but I decided to peruse the fabric store for starry printed fabric, and brought home a couple of options. I decided I liked this one the best.

I was also nervous about this because I've never used printed fabric on a cover, and I was worried how the title would look. So I reconfigured my original design to make it legible. Oh, and thanks Joann's for having this holographic HTV on clearance! I love how it looks a million different colors, depending on the light and the angle and what it's reflecting.

Now. Go read this lovely fic if you haven't already!

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bead on the edge endbands...

... and how to make them easier and touch them up a bit.

One thing I find incredibly helpful is using a core like 'glue on endbands' and then sew around it. It keeps the core in place and can even be done on perfect bound books. With sewn books I do a tie down in the first and last section to secure the ends more firmly to the text block, but it doesn't really need more tie downs.

I leave the fake core a bit larger than the book so I can work really the outside of the first section to the outside of the last. Only after that I trim the core down and try to cut it as close as I can to the endband thread without damaging it.

Still there's a good chance some of the core remains visible. If it blends in with the endbands and or covering materials I just leave it. If not I colour it slightly with a coloured pencil (I don't use coloured pens for that because the colour can soak into the thread and might be even more obvious than the visible core had been).

After that's done I seal the colour by dabbing a bit of PVA on the edge and the lower part of the first wrap of thread there. This also helps to keep that outermost wrap from slipping off the core.

If there is a little fuzz on the thread used for endbands, those can be burned off by running a flame over it real quick. It just burns the fuzz off but doesn't damage the thread. I've done this cotton and silk thread now, but I hear it also works for polyester thread.

As a last step I check the bead. Sometimes it looks a bit irregular. But that can often be fixed or at least lessened by pushing it down on the edge with a blunt instrument. I like to use my small bonefolder for that, but a blunt butter knife or a round tipped spatula would work just the same. Just check there's nothing the thread might catch on before using it.

Last I secure the endband by gluing a bit of tissue paper to the spine side of it. High enough to cover the sewing holes and start/ end knot, but not as high to be visible when looking at the endband once the book is finished.

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Question for Taylor Swift fans/bookbinders

I'm not sure if this question is for bookbinders or Taylor Swift fans or both, but I would like to make my niece one of these lyric books I've seen people post for her birthday. (It's either that or bind Crimson Rivers for her and I think she'd be less embarrassed to receive a book of Taylor Swift lyrics from me, not because she's ashamed of reading fanfic because when we were on a family vacation a couple of years ago, my mom asked what she was reading and she said "gay wizard fanfic" all cool and then I said "same" and we had a bit of a bonding moment but nevertheless I don't think she really wants further acknowledgement that she and her middle-aged aunt read the same fics, if you see what I'm saying.)

So. Seeing as I am not a TS fan (I have nothing against her, I find her delightful, she seems like a great role model, etc) I need some help here. Am I supposed to copy and paste all of the lyrics from all of her albums? Or just the "Eras" ones? What does that mean? Which ones are those? Should I know anything else?

If anyone can point me to some posts where people show off their binds, that would be helpful. I'm not sure if there are any formatting issues I should be aware of. (I just don't know what I don't know, you know?)

Maybe I should just do Crimson Rivers.

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I swear that was not on purpose. 👀 (you’ll know when you see it.)