#learning bookbinding

[panharmonium]

Bookbinding: The New Deal by Closer

Moar bookbinding! This one is a Suits fanfic that I bound for @brambleberrycottage's birthday (pictures shared with the author's permission).

[Same disclaimer as always applies: I do this for fun; no money has been made from this project!]

Notes on the binding: This was my third leather book, but my first time sewing on cords (my previous leather books were both split boards). The actual sewing process was definitely...something. Sewing is usually my favorite step of a bind, but not this time. (Possibly because I was sitting on the floor at the base of the stairs sewing the book on a shelf under my desk, as that was the easiest sewing frame hack I could come up with - once I rig something that will allow me to sit up like a human being and not be scrunched up like a hermit crab, I am sure I will enjoy the process more.)

So the sewing itself was a bit painful, but I did really love how the board attachment played out in the end, with the cords laced into the boards. It is SO satisfying not to be doing case bindings anymore! It's the same feeling of relief I had when I first learned how to do split board bindings - you have so much more control over the placement of the cover boards, so much less opportunity for skew, so much more stability. No more casing-in anxiety necessary. (You do acquire all-new steps to be anxious about, but for me, it's worth it).

Notes on the design: I've never actually watched Suits, but the fic itself takes place in and around Harvard Law, so I used that as my inspiration for the book's design. The book is covered in crimson leather from Siegel. Endbands are handsewn with metallic red and gold threads. The blind tooling on the cover is a street map of Cambridge, MA, which I drew onto tracing film and then tooled through the film onto the leather. (So far I've only used a foil quill heat pen to do this, because brass tools are expensive. I'm taking a class on traditional tooling soon and I'm VERY excited for it, but for now, this is what I have access to.)

The gold outlines in the design highlight the buildings of Harvard Law. (These lines are also not actual gold tooling - paint pen for now.)

^ early design work, featuring unsightly eraser smudges.

I followed a similar theme/color scheme for the interior. For the endpapers, I used acrylic paints and a dry sponge to make a crimson and gold pattern:

For the title page, I modified an image of Harvard's Veritas shield to display the fic's title and author.

The chapter headers may not immediately ping an association for anyone who doesn't live here/spend a lot of time on the T, but they were the first thing I came up with - they're designed to look like the signage for the Red Line, which is the subway route that serves Harvard Square.

Notes for future me: The one thing that went "wrong" with this bind was that the endpapers ended up being short at the foreedge. I knew this was going to happen before I pasted them down, but I had to make a choice between two undesirable results - the boards were already VERY slightly curved inwards after doing the fill-in, and if I used paste on the endpapers (so they would stretch), I was worried it would pull too hard as it dried and make the boards curve too much. But if I used PVA, the endpapers wouldn't stretch enough and would end up being short. I decided I would rather have short endpapers than warped boards, so that's what I went with, but next time I might try doing one less lining inside the boards and hope that the pastedown will handle more of the counterpull.

Despite little things like that, I had a great time with this! Every time I make something I learn new things, and every time something goes "wrong" it's good to look back and be like "ten years ago I was duct taping the spines of loose pages that I covered in cardstock! i'm doing fine, actually." Lots of progress has happened and lots of fun has been had, which is ultimately the point.

Big thank yous are owed to @brambleberrycottage for letting me send her all my bookbinding experiments, and also to Closer for a) writing this fic in the first place and b) okay'ing the sharing of photos! Much appreciation goes out to both of you :)

[wonderarium]

a book really is like. the pinnacle of objects. just peak form. the rare human win for coming up with them.

[ifyoucandaniel]

ARIK DONT CLICK

spoilers for “life happens” by @cdelphiki

when leaving kudos isn’t enough so you have to hand bind your favorite fic and annotate it for your friend to read because nothing will make you feel the way That One Fic did

(yes i made kudo stickers so that i could literally leave kudos on my favorite chapters and there’s no limit to how many kudos i can leave on the fic now )

[duncebento]

im trying to learn abt bookbinding and everything that’s coming up is ppl printing out ao3 stuff so they can pretend it’s books. what do you think her life is like and how old do you think she is also

[eulaliasims]

Round 6: Farseer 1 / 4

None of the households are going to be played in order this round and I'm just accepting that at this point.

Anyway. River has moved out on their own. I probably should've left them with Orla and Maddan, but that house is small and also they probably wouldn't have gotten any focus this round with the drama that those two have going on. And wouldn't you know it, I forgot to roll a ROS for them until after I finished playing. 🙃

Drustan, I'm gonna lock you in one of the damn caves at this rate.

River has planted a new garden at their cottage. Working outside with the plants is good for their nerves; very soothing.

River is very sociable for a sim with two outgoing points. Throw a party this, want to go on an outing that and so on.

Just a friendly backrub between gal pals! Do we think Sun has noticed Jia is flirting with her yet, or has she inherited Norweni's obliviousness? I'm starting to think it's the latter.

Speaking of Norweni, she's also at the market today and getting shoved around by Shep. Shep, girl, chill a little bit, okay?

Norweni: Shep. I'm going to do you a favor once and assume you've been drinking, and tell you to go home and sleep it off. Got it?

Brigid swooped in immediately afterward to compliment Norweni, lol. This is not at all an obvious attempt to suck up to her.

Oh, yeah, we're supposed to be following River, not Seax family drama.

Anyway, River has slowly been making friends with people in the village, like their new neighbors, Helenet and Elmet, or Gede here, who they met at the summer festival. Gede is a very cheerful and smiley man!

[cheeseshredder]

finished the rebinding!!! i’m really happy with how this turned out, very excited to give it to my partner 🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️‼️‼️ original drawing + progress pictures below

[ryeallytired]

I (partially) finished my bookcloth dustjacket designs for the first two BBC Merlin books!

(if folks want, once I finish all the designs, I can make a how-to post for making these for your own merlin books)

Symbols:

For The Dragon's Call, the top two are supposed to look like two sides of an old style coin that was stamped with the symbols that appear on Excalibur in the show. The bottom two are chains in reference to Kilgharrah (and something something the chains of destiny and knowing how it "should be" or smthing...)

Valiant was a little harder, not as much to pull from. So it gets crossed swords for the tournament that's taking place, with the dog statue's head as the bottom symbols.

[lokidotir]

I've done it!

After most of a year digitizing my art, brainstorming the different components, and finally learning how to bookbind, Here is my finished product!

Every page is hand drawn by be, digitized for clearer inking, then hand stitched pages for a one of a kind everytime coloring book.

Only one of these images is a screenshot Redraw while the rest are pure mind drawn. It was still hand drawn (on cardboard) over two days then digitized like the rest.

20 pages of art. With soooo many more for a part two AND three!

I didn't want to make it to big, but this one is purely rottmnt fan pages.

I have more in the works for my own drawings, hopefully simplified versions of them.

I'm very excited to see if anyone likes this as much as I do :3

[kloofspeaks]

Really told myself I was going to one-up myself with The OathBreaker book I make, here’s a rough on the designs I have laid out because I feel like sharing.

(I’m going ahead and forming the layout so all I have to do when it’s finished is actually just copy paste, format, print, bind and assemble)

These are bound to change but this is for my Cricut to cut out in silver metallic iron-on and going on the outside of the book.

[seedling-spark]

It's done! The Word of Joseph is complete!

I'll also be posting a link to a Google drive later that has the pdf for it, as well as the cover design.

[lighthouseshepard]

you know whats absolutely insane to me. nsi, when its finished, will be well over 100k words. like. thats a whole ass novel. thats a chaptered book. and yeah it could be LESS technically, could have been less; i have a tendency to Not Be Concise about Anything Ever. and even though its difficult not to go through and pick it apart and think of how i could have taken the story in a different direction, or how things might be worded differently. im weirdly proud of it? i dont get proud of anything ever rlly. so its unusual. but not a bad unusual. and again its a silly lil fanfic on the internet but i put quite a bit of myself into it. i dunno. maybe ill bookbind it when it's done

[talesfromthornvale]

realised I forgot to put this up here but! I bound the tales from thornvale transcripts for seasons 1 & 2!!

[ddeck]

if your creative project is not making you rip your hair out are you even doing anything

[madmonksandmaenads]

If you love a fanfic, have you considered printing and handbinding it yourself so that future scholars might have a glimpse into a culture built on ephemeral infrastructure?

[boldlygotohelll]

Cant work out if I'm genius or if this makes me officially a technophobe

[starmagnets]

fic so good you have to just sit down and Process It after every chapter