Hydrangea Bindery

Here's the storyboard go check it out

Hoping to have it finished and ready to go the second the next life series drops (or have it finished by the finale if it comes too soon).

Currently fleshing out designs. I'll post them over the next few months (weeks?) if there's any interest

DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game

Full cloth binding with paper onlay (Bradel binding)

Blood over bright haven by M.L. Wang

Bind #4 - Switch by Ceres_Libera on AO3

What do you mean I finished binderary project #4 before bindery project #2 & #3

This is not only my favourite ever fic, but my favourite ever book/story/wherever. I've come back to it so many times over the years and every time I absolutely adore it.

Tiny text is tiny because I wanted to make a text block that fit through my guillotine.

This was originally meant to be my "over the top/impractical cover design with rhinestones, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted something that wouldn't get damaged with use, and I didn't want to buy rhinestone application equipment for one project. I might still try it in the future though.

First i would like to say I’m grateful to @kingburu for given the world such a good story and for allowing me to have the honor of doing all this so i could have it in my shelf. If any of my jasico fellows haven’t read this one on ao3 yet, please do. It’s funny, adventurous, romantic and, in personal biased opinion, really feels like a percy jackson story in a way that not everyone is able to emulate. There’s so many good moments in this fic and while doing all the process of typesetting I realized that it was even better than i had recalled before, so many phrases that got stuck in my mind.

I also want to say thanks for @thinkingjasico and all the support he provided through this project. The amount of times i kept bothering him about it, asking for opinions in all the aspects you can imagine and even crying because something didn’t felt right can’t be counted (yeah, sometimes typesetting can be THAT frustrating). If weren’t for him i would’ve probably given up long time ago, so thanks for being such a good friend.

And of course, last but not least, I couldn’t forget the marvelous and extremely talented @maryviolinart (go follow her on insta and here too) for this gorgeous cover art. If you’re looking for an amazing artist who draws beautifully and is super attentive throughout every part of the process I would highly recommend you check the available slots when her commissions open again.

nonetheless, it was a truly crazy thing to do, a bit more stressful than i had imagined but in the end i’m really happy with how everything ended up. Jasico is one of top 3 ships, one that helped a lot through the pandemic, so every time i look to my shelf or any time i wanna see a bit of them i know one more place where to find them. my first project for them but i hope it won’t be the last ❤️

My Rhack fic, "These Accursed Stars", hand made and painted by @squickymuse.

I don't think it's overstating to say that I'm the person who first popularized fanbinding on Tumblr. I began binding fic in September 2018. It was and is an exciting, novel way to participate in the traditional fannish gift economy. You do it with your own two hands, and you have the chance to make an extravagant gift to authors whose often very personal work means so much to you. In the process you have many opportunities to create close personal connections within fandom.

Because there are so many wonderful fics out there, one person could never give them all the love and recognition they deserve. I really wanted to see the practice grow beyond myself. I wrote a detailed manual of my process and offered it up for free so other people could join in. In the years since, Renegade Bookbinding Guild has arisen, always as a team collaborative effort, and it's remained a community focused phenomenon that explicitly supports open knowledge sharing without fees, deep respect for fic authors, and fosters more practice of that gift economy. You, dear reader, are welcome to join us in this project. We have bound thousands of books at this point, and every day more books are born.

I'm not on TikTok, but I've been linked to a lot of misinformation being posted on it over the last few years. I've also heard about a lot of profiteering going on, taking advantage of the hard creative work other fans have freely offered to feed our souls. Speaking only for myself, I think it's a damn shame that some are so quick to commodify the work of other fans. Gifts should beget gifts, not grifts.

When we treat fanworks as free "content" from faceless sources, to suck down voraciously and demand more, or make a quick buck off, the supply will start to dry up. Fanworks are labors of love, but they are still a lot of labor. The energy that keeps folks engaged and creating is essentially a feedback loop. Many authors and other creators are spurred onward to make more, write another chapter, draw another porny picture, bind another book, simply because of the sheer joy they see that their act of creation gives to other fans. I see the Renegade philosophy as helping to supply that energy back into the system. Fic authors deserve that we respect their works as their own, and that fic you love that they spent so long writing deserves every bit of fawning, gibbering, ranting, sighing, rec listing, and sometimes binding, that we fic readers might offer it in return.

Another wee book for Wisteria_daydreams, this time a fic I wrote for her birthday this year. Again this was a fully paper-bound copy, with an HTV title. I need to start a list of fonts that behave at this scale; this one came out well but didn’t love being heated. I was pleased to find a scrap of this purple paper left over from another bind, as well as the purple, glittery HTV, as that’s the giftee’s favourite colour.

I also made myself a tiny copy, but the papers are reversed on mind (white cover/purple spine).

For starters, that thick book cloth doesn't get into the grooves (amiriteladies) as I planned with my prototypes. Here, in the first shot, is a very soft line on an emboss element. It Must be tight given the precision of the abutment of the element above it (being the lighter blue). Did I do that? I did not. Which means the skull element is now off a tiny bit, which is visible, noticeable, and obvious. It makes my blood fall out.

FYI, the skull is the only instance of homemade book cloth on the piece and it Still has glue seepage around the bottommost eye. Could I live with it? Perhaps in isolation. Buuuuut-

I wasn't thinking and gave the boards the usual mm for a cute little edge- which does not work with the flap. Huge gap. Made all the more pronounced by the stiffness of the book cloth. It's so stiff the magnet clasp has a very hard time keeping the book shut.

Alas the bit that broke the camel's back is this. I had a fuck of a time getting the vinyl in This Area Alone to stick. So by the time the obdurate pieces adhered, the others had massive glue seepage. I think it might have someone to do with the magnet but I'm not in the habit of ironing magnets so that's a guess.

Dare to Dream (alternate title: Sparrow's first serious foray into fanbinding)

So, you may remember me posting a couple times about fanbinding last year. This is the first of many results from that! back in like last September or something I started preparing to bind Dare to Dream, by @noelle-holi-gay (many thanks for letting me bind it!). Unfortunately, I leapt into sewing the text block (along with two others I intend to post about later) with very little understanding of what I was doing, and wound up with no idea how to attach the covers, or just what the fuck I was doing in general.

Once my hubris had caught up to me, I kind of lost motivation on this project for a number of months. But after a while my older sister helped me figure out a way to stick some covers on it, and while the results leave a lot to be desired, I'm pretty proud of myself for actually finishing it.

So, on to the details

The text block is just regular printer paper

the cover paper is some kind of mulberry paper, I think. I got it at Blick Art Supplies a while ago.

the pastedowns are cardstock from a random pad of scrapbook paper.

yeah I didn't really keep great track of what my materials were

the cover art is by @funzos

Things I'm proud of

I actually finished it!

it'll probably be reasonably sturdy. I chose acid free materials and stuff.

I learned a lot! (albeit mostly about what not to do)

Things I'd like to improve on (binding edition)

I don't like how the covers look. The color of the paper looked a lot nicer on the website than in person.

the way I tied the covers on is very awkward. in the future I need to know how I'm attaching the covers *before* I start sewing lol.

The covers are so thick. like, comically thick compared to the text block. like probably literally just as thick as the text block. look at this thing.

Things I'd like to improve on (typesetting edition)

The text is uncomfortably small

there are weird gaps between the paragraphs that look nice on Ao3 but are really annoying in a physical book

Overall, I'm pretty happy to be done with what I've at times called a frankenbinding, and glad to have this fic on my shelf. I look forward to binding more fics and continuing to improve in this craft.

Hey folks!

If you haven heard we're crowdfunding the SOFTCOVER ANTHOLOGY EDITION of PRISM KNIGHTS (Winter's completed series of short stories featuring queer knights of varying identities)!

The picture above is the iteration of the stories from the last run of the campaign printed as mini soft covers in a boxed set. These were super well received we'd be so happy to bring these back-- and potentially the Hardcover:

As mentioned in our last post, these stories are a bit of a 6 shades of Gay situation where each colour of the rainbow follows a different queer identity via knights and royals... and maybe even.... a dragon~ They're a messy bunch. Here's our quick pitch of each of the stories:

Coqelicot -- a redux of Rapunzel featuring evil lesbian knights. Bronze -- a redux of The Princess & The Pea featuring a nonbinary, ace knight caught in a time loop. Lamplight -- a redux of Beauty & The Beast featuring a trans knight learning to love and forgive herself. Juniper -- a redux of Cinderella featuring a tragic gay knight running from his past and right into a blacksmith's arms~ Sapphire -- a redux of Sleeping Beauty featuring a polyam ship between a dragon (she/her), a knight (she/they) and a royal (they/them)~ Velvet -- a redux of 12 Princesses featuring a bisexual knight overcoming grief.

While the stories are in a Series you don't need to read them in order but the characters DO overlap here and there!

If any of this sounds like its your jam.... consider...

backing the project~

Here are some pictures!! There's also a video here of Pam flipping through it so you can see the gorgeous edge papers as well, so please check that out if you're at all interested in bookbinding, or even if you just like pretty things because it is so, so pretty. The book is 366 (!!!!) beautiful pages and I'm so, so in love with it.

This story is extremely special to me. It wasn't the first fic I wrote for OFMD, but somehow it always feels like it was. I wanted the setting of the fic to feel the same way the show itself made so many of us feel — a place where we could feel safe, loved, and celebrated for exactly who we are. And somehow, it feels even more poignant to me after the cancellation. We'll always have the show, and this universe will always have the Sanctuary.

This story is the longest thing I've ever written, in a genre that was totally new to me, making it by far the most ambitious project I'd undertaken up to that point. And I wrote it all not too long after assuming I was done with fandom, and any sort of creative writing, for good. Oh, how OFMD changes our best-laid plans.