ehyde | Entries tagged with bookbinding

It's been a while since I posted any bookbinding photos here! I keep feeling like I'm not getting as many projects done as I'd like, but looking back, I've made a pretty decent number this past year. I'm not going to post full writeups or full photosets here, but brief descriptions + one photo each under the cut, and links to their tumblr posts if you'd like to read more details.

( Read more... )

For my birthday I got a folding light tent for taking book photos -- I used it on the most recent book. It's a little smaller than I expected so I may eventually take the LED ring from it and build into a larger box. For now, with a little photoshop around the edges it's fine.

- I got my bike tuned up and bought a trailer for it on craigslist--next year I can take Youngest to preschool biking instead of walking with a stroller! I'd have done this earlier if I realized it's not really any harder to tow two kids than one, but at any rate, it's never too late to start. I did however make the unfortunate (or maybe fortunate?) discovery that while biking is, yes, faster than walking, it also uses muscles whose existence I haven't acknowledged in several years. Probably worth it.

- I'm typsetting You Yao / Are You OK? for my next bookbinding project and I have reached the point where I have to decide if I want to stop at the main story, or include mtl extras. At this point I want to at least figure out what the extras are about so I'll probably end up including them? But I'll be annoyed at them the whole time.

I've also reached the point in the design process where I'm truly excited about what the physical book will be like once I finalize the typeset and print. My initial design self-prompt was "play with anachronisms" and from there I went "what if some variation of a stab binding?" but I quickly concluded two things: a) while You Yao is short for a cnovel, it is far too long for a stab binding and b) any pseudo/mock stab binding isn't going to look like "playing with a concept" it's just going to look like a cop-out. So, if I want a stab binding, split it up into multiple volumes, and do it for real.

But at that point it's just a straight historic style. What then?

Splitting into multiple volumes is simple, You Yao is 10 interconnected short stories, 2 per book is a good length. Then I thought, make it reversible! Two stories that start at either end and meet in the middle. I don't know if it's quite "anachronism" but it's fun and feels in line with the story.

This book has made it to its recipient, so now I can share!

Handmade book opened flat, showing the front and back covers. The title "Cut Him Out in Little Stars" is printed in gold on a galaxy print background.

Handmade book opened flat, showing the front and back covers. The title "Cut Him Out in Little Stars" is printed in gold on a galaxy print background.

The fic "Cut Him Out in Little Stars" by ChaoticAndrogynous, in which Wei Wuxian is reborn as a comet, is possibly my favorite fic I've read in the past year. I started typesetting it almost immediately after reading it last summer, but various other projects happened and I didn't finish the binding until now.
( Details and many more pics )

This is my (I think) twentieth bookbinding project, and thirty-somethingth individual book, since I started bookbinding two years ago. Maybe I'll make a stats post/retrospective later!

❧ I'm jumping on the bandwagon of moving my fic to a personal archive in addition to ao3 - I don't intend to remove my fic from ao3 at this time, but as a backup and as a different option. I got myself a neocities site back in November when everyone started looking for twitter alternatives, but I hadn't done much with it until now. I'm doing this by a combination of melannen's guide, looking at the code of other neocities pages that look nice, and adapting my defunct personal site from a decade ago. Right now my writing page is the most complete - I'm not completely happy with it but it's going in a direction I like (the links just go to the basic html as downloaded from ao3 - I plan to update that eventually too - and I also need to figure out how to make it work on mobile).

❧ Speaking of everyone looking for twitter alternatives, my partner's brother has been building sift, which is more of a recommendation and content sharing tool (for links posted from anywhere) than a social site, but might be interesting to some people.

❧ And speaking of my partner's brother, we flew to California last weekend for his wedding, which was lovely (outdoors in a park with redwoods). Flying cross country with three small kids is always a challenge but it went a lot better this time than the last time.

❧ Some bookbinding projects since I last posted (wow it's been a while since I last posted): Restoration by Ritualist, Impossible to Stay Away, Impossible to Stay by dragongirlG (alternate version), I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall, They All Say I've Met a Ghost by Cyan Wings, and a new version of Pluck the Stars by exoscopy. Of these, I had the most fun making Ghost - modeled after a very haunted notebook bound in human skin, about which our oblivious protagonist only thinks "oh, what a nice heirloom."

❧ Bookbinding discord is doing a Tiny Book Bang, for which I'm taking the opportunity to typeset a couple of shorter fics, and having fun with typography. One I'm doing in imitation of William Morris' Kelmscott Press (I would not have the patience to do this for anything longer than 20k lol) and another I'm doing in the style of Aldus Manutius (Italian Renaissance printer, and it's completely appropriate to the MDZS fic I'm typesetting, I'm technically supposed to keep the fics I'm typesetting for the event secret but if you know you know).

❧ Finally, a fic rec: The Scarlet Lotus by rainbowninja167, a canonverse wangxian Scarlet Pimpernel au. I will admit that my first thought was "why would you make WWX the Scarlet Pimpernel analogue when Nie Huaisang is right there?" but it really works. The author has put a lot of thought into writing the characters in a way that works for the AU but still feels like them. This is a wip but there are only two chapters left and the author seems to be updating weekly.

Apparently Priest announced that Tai Sui will be edited/revised this year or next, which has caused me to rearrange my bookbinding plans a little bit (I mean, I don't know if the translator will do anything with the revisions anyway, but it's at least worth waiting a bit to see). But I wasn't anywhere close to ready to bind it anyway so it's not a big deal. It's good news I think--I loved the book but there were definitely some places where the pacing suffered a bit.

I finished and sent off the book I made for the Renegade Bindery Exchange! The fic is Thirty-three Lashes by Wingless, as requested by Jenny Linsky. It's a modern reincarnation AU ... sort of? Basically it's immortal LWJ, and WWX who comes back in MXY's body as he does in canon, except that rather than thirteen years later, it's a couple thousand.

The fic isn't a pure horror fic but it has a lot of horror elements and I decided to lean into those in the binding, using rough layered paper cutouts to reflect the scars of LWJ's curse. It's a three piece bradel binding with a dark red leather spine (I learned that if I tape it down to paper, I can run thin leather through my printer! neat!) The endpapers are suminagashi marbling on the same red paper as the innermost layer of the cover.

This one took a while to make, especially since all my kids got colds in the middle of the project and I lost my evening worktime for a week, but I'm really happy with how it came out!

( Pictures under the cut )

The local bubble tea shop's seasonal offering is green tea with honey, ginger, and citron, and when I ordered it last week I missed the part of the description saying it was a "seasonal hot tea" and ordered it iced. I liked it enough that I wanted to try it as intended, so today I ordered it hot, and I think I like it better iced. I hope it stays on the menu for a while!

6yo has been sick this week so I haven't done as much as I'd wanted to, but we did still manage to pick up a dresser I found on craigslist--a kids' wooden dresser that the previous owner had painted purple, teal, and what I thought in the picture was brown but turned out to be a dark green. It has greenish-purple crystal knobs, too. It's a welcome change from furniture painted gray, and 6yo loves it.
( bookbinding thoughts )

"I should make a bookbinding icon. What if I took a nice pic of a stack of my favorite books I bound--" I said, forgetting for a moment that my book designs are most interesting on the front covers and very boring on the spines.

The books in the new icon are: pluck the stars - Moonlight Caught in Mutton Fat - Last of Our Kind - we waste the same day like nobody dies - Son of a Notorious Father and these are all fic recs too, btw.

I need to make other new icons too, if I'm going to be more active here. I want to make a Tai Sui icon, but there's no official art! Time to go take a picture of a tree I guess.

A couple days ago I thought, "this would be a great time for a friending meme," and spookykingdomstarlight is running a MDZS/CQL one now!

There HAS to be a better way to solve my printer's color balance issues than manually lowering the cyan saturation in each individual image. Ugh. But whatever it is, I have not found it. Printer troubleshooting is my least favorite aspect of bookbinding.

Before I got to this step of the process, I was having a fun time typesetting--that's what I've been doing with most of my free time this week. Most of my reading has been (sigh) rubbernecking the twitter situation, but I do have a fic rec to drop off: "Hear a song so deeply" by

so_shhy It's a modern cultivation au, which I'm predisposed to like already, but something else I really liked about this was the worldbuilding surrounding musical cultivation and demonic cultivation. In this universe, the Lan sect's musical cultivation techniques were lost centuries ago, and LWJ is a researcher attempting to reconstruct them. If I bound this fic (we'll see; my list is long), I'd like to do some sort of longstitch/visible stitching technique with the stitching on the spine mimicking guqin strings.

Related: sometimes I ask myself "is this book design too gimmicky?" and then I remind myself that I am printing and binding fanfiction and I should do what makes me happy.

So I'm working on another book project, and what happened was I found some cheap drawing paper at the craft store and said to myself, this feels like an old paperback, I should make a book out of this. And my first thought was something horror ish, because this was about a week before Halloween, so I picked out one of my favorite horror ish fics, and printed it on that paper, and it looked good, and eh whatever if it's not archival quality, it's cool right?

...and then the fic's author (who hasn't seen any of this yet) posted a very intense thread on twitter about how we're losing so much history because of books printed on acidic paper that are literally disintegrating and I therefore reprinted the entire thing .

Still working on bookbinding, working now on two different projects - the first one is suffering from second sock syndrome, as I'm making a copy for myself and a copy for the author. I did most of the work in parallel, but the cover is embroidered, and - originally I was working on the second project because I wanted to do part of it while my sister is visiting, but it soon became clear I wasn't going to get to that step before she had to leave, but I kept working on that book because it was more fun than embroidery.

But I did learn some new things! Sister taught me some resin craft, and I made a few dice. I'm going to make a translucent resin window in a book cover, in theory, so this was color testing for that - but I learned that fountain pen ink does not work to color resin.

I also learned that tracing paper/vellum cannot be pasted down without excessive wrinkles, so my original plan of using it to make made endpapers had to be scrapped. But in the process I also learned that mulberry tissue paper (unryu paper) behaves beautifully pasted down, so I ended up with a result I liked even better than my original plan.

And tonight I went back to the embroidery! It's slightly closer to being finished.

Current Mood: creative

Very belatedly, posting this here.

I saw a post about fandom bookbinding (fanbinding) and I thought, oh, neat! I could do that! It's not that I wasn't aware of the concept of making pretty, physical copies of fanfics--tarrlok and clockworkspider made me gorgeous printed copies of two of my fics. But this was the first time I'd seen it with traditional bookbinding, cloth covered hardbacks, that kind of thing. (I also thought hey, I could actually make my own print copy of MDZS, which is less relevant now).

The fanbinding discord is neat, too. Many people with strong opinions about archiving and preserving fic. I think I'm in it less for that cause and more as a type of fanart? But yeah.

Anyway though I decided to make a blank book first, as a tutorial project, which is what's pictured here. I'm already working on a book with words in it though and it's nearing completion.