Edelkirsche Handmade

So the very first thing you should do is measure your book and write it down on paper. Make sure you are measuring from different spots, as book binding is a manual process and sometimes the measurement can vary by 1-2mm. Write down the biggest measurement you get

I write down the measurements for the TOP/BOTTOM and SPINE piece, and add ~3-4mm. This is to account for the inside paper lining thickness and bookcloth when you fold it over the edge.

Adding too many extra mm could make the slipcase too loose and your book will slip out very easily, and making it too tight means you can't put the book in without having to use force and risk damaging the book and slipcase. My slipcases do tend to end a wee bit on the snug side, still easy to push in but need to shake a few times to get the book out, so I usually add a ribbon to the case to make it easier to remove the book.

For this book, my measurements are

SPINE: Length: 210mm+3 = 213mm Width: 32mm+3 = 35mm

TOP/BOTTOM: Length: 137mm+3 = 140mm

Width: 35mm, same as the SPINE piece

DAS measures all the pieces at once. For the FRONT and BACK pieces, you'll have to account in the board thickness into the measurement too, so the math is something like

board thickness*2 + SPINE Length

and the width is 140mm (same as TOP/BOTTOM Length)

BUT, I am bad at math. I had to redo the FRONT and BACK pieces for slipcases soooo many times now I just assemble the SPINE - TOP - BOTTOM pieces first, measure the total from there and then cut the FRONT and BACK. If you hate cutting, and you're more confident in your measurement and math you can also cut the front and back piece at this stage

Another important thing to keep in mind is the grain direction of the board, when you're cutting the pieces the grain direction should be running like this:

Once the pieces are cut, I glue them onto the inside paper lining. Make sure that here the grain direction is also running the same as the board pieces:

After that is done and I have cut the pieces from the paper, I start assembling it:

Make sure that the SPINE piece is sandwiched between the TOP/BOTTOM pieces. A cleaner visual of what I mean by that:

I use the following tools to keep boards in place while the glue is drying:

Magnetic corner clamp, 90° Corner clamp with guide grooves Corner clamp, 90°

Once that done, I note down the measurements for the FRONT/BACK pieces:

As I mentioned before, the formula for the FRONT/BACK Length is

board thickness*2 + SPINE Length

my boards are 2.5mm thick my SPINE length is 213mm so that means 2.5mm*2 + 213mm = 218mm (which is also the measurement my ruler is giving me yay me)

the width for the FRONT/BACK is 140mm (same as TOP/BOTTOM Length)

Once again, make sure the grain direction of your board is correct, glue the inside paper lining to the board

aaaand it's assmebling time!

I like to use my 3kg coin box as a weight for pressing the board pieces down lmfao

After the glue is dry, your slipcase should look like this:

I decorated the endpapers with a heat pen and gold foil.

Wow, so this fic agonized me for the longest time for multiple different reasons. Lots of good things happened but a few setbacks happened as well.

For starters, I couldn't make up my mind about the cover OR interior design. At first I wanted to make reference to the "heart, don't forget" part that immediately precedes the titular "something like that" lyrics and I aimed for a sort of "ribbon around the finger" theme but really hated the way it looked. In the end i settled on something adjacent to the red string of fate. In part because I'm still have a lot of fun embroidering the cover for stuff and wanted to chose a theme I could easily (well, not easily) translate into embroidery. I love the way it looks at the end, so the extra time to deliberate was definitely worth it.

As far as the actual text block goes - I made a book press!

No more badly cut wooden scraps between clamps for me. This thing is great, and maybe one day Ill splurge on a proper commercial press but for now this does the job perfect. I really wanted to be able to do painted edges and I knew i had to be able to clamp the textblock as hard as possible which I wasn't going to accomplish with my previous set up. And the painted edges turned out great! This is just regular acrylic mixed with water and painted on in layers. I'll admit to a bit of bleeding, but I think that's because on the first side I tried, I didn't sand it enough, because the other two sides were perfectly fine.

The other thing I accomplished on this bind which I haven't previouslty is a real sewn headband, which took me several frustrating attempts to do but I managed a servicable enough attempt. This is with fairly heavy gauge string, using the woven innards of a piece of cotton rope as the core. Next time I'll downsize the thread gauge and maybe do two colors instead.

Now onto the bad....

When I stared this bind I still had my shitty vevor guillotine and I knew it wouldn't cut it (no pun intended), so I swapped it for this 12" Hardware Factory cutter which I highly highly reccomend. This thing cuts through paper like butter. You know what else it cuts through like butter? My finger. Because I seriously miscalcuated HOW sharp this thing is, and in my haste to use my brand new toy my thumb went a little too close to the blade while adjusting the position of the text block and sliced off my fingernail and a decent amount of the skin beneath. So that set me back about 2 weeks because I simply couldn't use my right hand for anything.

Once I had my dexterity back, I was able to actually get to the embroidery for the cover. The hands actually weren't that hard to embroider. I drew what I wanted on my iPad and then just traced it onto the bookcloth. Then it was just a matter of lining everything up. The white fabric I used was very thin, however, and the brown colored stiff board I used for the covers darkened the fabric too much so I pasted a sheet of white paper down beneath the fabric to keep it nice and white.

But I did kind of a crappy job and the paper wasn't big enough. So near the edge, the brown board still shows through if you look close.

Also, you can see where the back end of the embroidery thread was flopping about and is visible through the white fabric.

On my last bind I did some fancy, overkill cutting to make sure the thread on the back of the embroidery didn't make the cover too bumpy, which gave me mixed results. So this time I didn't bother. All I did was glue the tied off ends of the thread down, but I missed this one, so it's still visible. I know better for next time!

And lastly, for the second time..... the spine is not on centered. 😭 I just didn't line it up well enough and by the time I noticed (mere seconds later) I didn't want to pull it back and ruin the alreayd drying glue. So off-centered it is.