pecks u [affectionate]

Making this zine bind was a tall endeavour. This is my first time ever printing a full-colour zine and I wanted to make sure all the art looked crisp. Solution: sneak around and print the pages using my office's laser printer. Then, I painstakingly folded every one of the 248 pages precisely in half to ensure all the images and layout don't get swallowed up in the gutter (or get bad folding creases).

After that, weeks of pressing them all to flatten any folds or creases. One that's done, I spent an entire day just sewing the pages and pressing them some more to squish out any spine-swelling. You will not expand on my watch!

Since I wanted the pages and images to open fully, I decided on making this book a sewn-boards + split-board binding. Meaning: I paste the cover boards onto the text block and cover the spine with cloth - actually cut from my own pajamas! My intention was to cover the spine and fold the top/bottom ends over the boards but behind the spine.

Unfortunately, this didn't go so well - testing the result actually resulted in the spine crumpling. I needed to make some cuts so the cloth could 'flex' as the book opens and closes, so I slowly cut 1 cm of cloth on either side of the spine, tucking in the middle piece.

Result: a flexible spine that opens fully with wide hinges!

Messy, but it works!

After that, it's all a matter of designing the covers (I added '2025' just in case there might be a future couture zine!), cutting them, and applying them onto the book, and voila!

The book opens very nicely, with only a few pages being difficult because the glue somehow seeped in, despite my best efforts. There were several page spreads that I had to punch through with a needle and thread, though thankfully the result did not ruin these pages.

The zine wasn't designed to be made into a book, and I did not check earlier to see if any visuals or fanart had to be punched through. If I had known about this earlier, I might have imposed or printed them differently so they wouldn't have thread obscuring the hard work of fanartists and writers. Mea culpa.