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.

I learned a lot during the making of these binds. I did my first cut-out cover which I absolutely love, though I didn't plan the scaling of the drawing well and it is too wide to fit nicely in the space. Next time I know to make any cover drawings more vertical. the colors were also very washed out on regular paper, but I think that's the fault of my somewhat shitty printer. Next time I will likely try printing cover art on glossy photo paper and see how it looks/adheres.

For the spine, I originally bought some vinyl leather but the felt backing was too thick and absorbed all the PVA, it basically wouldn't stick at all. So instead I did some thrift store shopping to find a few pillow cases in a matching color. This is the first time I've used bookcloth for both the spine and cover (previously doing a fabric/paper combo or all paper). I think my rotary cutter is too dull because the trim on the book clothed frayed quite badly leaving me with a horrible edge once I applied it. I also overshot the glue and it seeped out, staining the spine fabric.

To hide fix it, I applied a stripe of black ribbon to cover where the fabrics meet. And then changed the blue ribbon bookmark to match the black which looks way better at the end.

And that's just the issues with the case. 😅 I also bought my very first guillotine! I bought a kind of cheap one off vevor (I know, don't tell me) and despite about 30 test cuts I had some technical difficulties cutting one of the text blocks. One ended up far shorter than the other, and terribly uneven. However, the one that came out nicely is really nice, and once I was done the bindings I spent a few hours finageling with the cutting blade and the positioning of the pad to get the cuts nice. My next bind should hopefully be way more square.

And as for the typography, I included some details I hadn't before, like QR's to link directly to the fics on Ao3 and all of the tags and word count (which I realized post-print that I accidentally chopped off for the final fic near the end of the page 🥲). I also experimented (painfully and at length) with full page dividers between the parts, with mixed results.

I don't have a borderless printer nor access to one, so what I did was to make the design for each section, print the left and right halves separately in the middle of an 11x17 piece of paper and then cut them down to the size of an 11x8.5 while matching up the designs, and then slotted that 11x8.5 into my stack of paper as it fed into the printer so that the signature formatting printed where i wanted around the manually cut sheets. whew! Do I like it? Yes. Will i do it again? Not likely. It wasn't printed on the same short grain paper as the rest of the the text block (I only have access to a big boy HP at work for 11x17's, dont tell my boss) so it loses some of it's nice fluid flip action because these pages mid signature have a different grain direction. But it looks cool, so I won't complain too hard.

I've yet to figure out how to put the title on the spine, so for now it's sadly blank. Theres lots of options that I haven't made a decision on and I dont want any (more) expensive and highly specific equipment or tools. So that is a learning opportunity for my next project. I also experimented with sewn headbands but I found it too difficult and not fun, and these books are so thin that my bad attempts stood out starkly, so I removed them are the end (and then forgot to put any headbands at all 🤨)