#my activities tracker informs me i have worked on bookbinding almost every day for like fifty days now

[helle-bored]

@marzipanilla. You have have opened the floodgates. :P

If I were a different and more patient person I might have started out practicing with elmers glue and cardboard, honestly. But I jumped right in instead, and here's the stuff I use:

Here you've got my regular sewing, gluing, and paper-cutting supplies. (Not pictured: bookcloth, fancy marbled cover paper, cardstock, an extremely scuzzy old ball peen hammer (heehee) I rummaged out of the machine-shop of random tools in various states of dubious usability we inherited from the previous owner of the house.)

Sewing a textblock uses linen thread & beeswax (for the thread), darner or chenille needles, an awl, something to punch into (cardboard), a marked paper to mark your signatures with (the white paper with notches), and a bone folder for creasing folded pages (black thing at the back). Thicker books also require (sort of a strong word, but most people seem to do it) some sort of fabric tape; I have grey twill tape that I got from Joann's.

Gluing uses flour paste for some things and a sturdier PVA glue for others. I do have a brush, but I often just use my fingers tbh.

Before you glue it you can see the tapes when you flip between signatures -- once it's glued the pages are all nice and flush. :) The unglued one on the left is Blackbird by sixpences and the glued one on the right (and the one in most of these pictures) is Weather With You by @thewuzzy, who has kindly allowed me to flail occasionally in their direction while putting together a couple copies of their fic, lol.

I format in Word and print booklet-style from adobe pdf reader with 8.5x11 inch six-page signatures, which works out to be twenty-four 5.5x8.5 inch book-pages in a signature. This means a 360 page book only uses 90 actual full-sized pages, which is good, because I have the paper custom-cut so the grain runs in the right direction. Shipping paper isn't cheap, it turns out.

My family is all aware of my new hobby and they think it's really neat, so they helped me build a press, which is how I glue and round the spine. Above on the right you can see the twill tapes and how I sew the signatures together; this book is about 350 pages or 100k.

Today I was working on rounding the spine and giving it shoulders (that mushroom shape) and sewing on headbands for WWY. This copy has a dark grey-blue thread alternating with blue metallic sewn directly into the top and bottom of the spine.

Those grey boards on the sides are what the case will be made of -- but they're too short. :( There's something I could try, but I'm probably just going to end up buying new boards because I'm kind of terrified of fucking it up, lmao.

The copy with headbands is ready for covering the spine with cloth and paper. Then I need to figure out my board dilemma so I can build the case and put it in there and slap in endpapers and cry when it's a bit crooked.

So anyway. Hours and hours and hours and hours of work, and honestly it's one of the most fun things I've done in months. There's a discord I'm in and everyone is cranking out amazing stuff every day and it's just really fucking neat to see this much love for fanfiction, which is what most of us bind.

(You should bind some star wars stuff! :P lots of people in the server do star wars things.)