Shrek-themed blank journal!
my choir director loves "Shrek" to the point it's become an inside joke, so in honor of her master's degree graduation I made her a shitpost in physical form, which I will present to her this evening at the chorus end-of-year potluck :D
this originally started life as "oh maybe I should make [choir director] a thing, I'll make her a Coptic journal with a cardstock cover with some art on it, maybe I'll laminate it". and then I kept "yes, and"-ing myself. and this happened.
this is my first square back Bradel bind! paper is Church Paper short grain cream paper with the 5mm dot grid from print-graph-paper.com. I sewed the text block with a French stitch. also my first time doing an elastic band closure and a pen loop! endpapers are something I found locally, stamped with a homemade wooden stamp using a StazOn brown solvent ink pad. back pocket is cardstock from the office supply store. title page & back pocket drawing were done in Procreate; font is Special Elite. book cloth is homemade Heat n Bond with generic-ass tissue paper as the backing.
this was definitely the best text block I've sewn yet. the French link stitch may have helped but I'd like to think I'm getting better at sewing, generally.
I did a moleskine-style elastic loop to hold the thing closed and figured out how to include a pen holder. I had to kind of hack getting the thing attached, but I think it'll hold up long term.
my choir director loves vintage 80s clothes and has carefully curated her wardrobe in that direction, with a lot of cool 80s button-down shirts, so obviously I went out and found some actual deadstock fabric from the 80s and made book cloth out of it. because of who I am as a person. which is to say someone who cannot not escalate shit to the next level, given the opportunity to do so.
it's important when gifting someone a blank journal that they can immediately tell you actually made it instead of just buying it in the store. it helps you bank brownie points for later. also it gives you the ability to troll them to unprecedented levels heretofore unrealized by god or man.
I wanted to find a rubber stamp of an onion for the endpapers but I couldn't find anything locally and didn't want to buy lino tools just for this project because my god have you seen my craft room, and everything online was boring and expensive and would take forever to get to me. so at 11 PM on thursday night, in a fit of rage, I channeled the spirit of my theater tech child-in-law and was like "oh my god I can make this my goddamn self", went to the basement, dug up a beginner's carving kit from the outer ring, lower strata of my crafting area, and carved an onion stamp, powered by spite and fury at capitalism
the foredges of the case are reinforced with commercial book cloth that was actually made in this century, because as it turns out 40 year old fabric gets fragile after a while and it cracked at the bend around the front cover. originally i patched it with moar 80s book cloth but it looked janky and didn't stick well, so i went with the black cloth along the edges. I think it looks pretty good, actually
alsooooo the guillotine I thrifted a while back I think needs its blade sharpened, or a new blade, whichever one, because it did skew the text block a bit and caused a hilarious animated effect with the dots if you flip through the book lol. you cannot see it in this picture but just trust me bro
the thing was done by last night at 8 PM except for the pocket, which wasn't going to take long and which was originally just going to be plain, unadorned cardstock. and then I was like "you know what would be funny"
obviously i had to spend the time i would have been making the pocket drawing the fairy godmother instead and then make the pocket after that. do not worry about what time i went to bed. shhhh
(pro tip if you print out something on cardstock using a laser printer it is very likely to smudge. spray fixative is the solution but it does mean you have to maybe sit the book outside on your front porch at zero dark thirty with random shit holding it open so the off-gassing can happen before you put it under weights for the night so it can get nice and flat. maybe.)
miraculously, the next morning i pulled the thing out from under the weights and it was a book. who knew! the 4 color pen is a new thing but reminds me of being a kid in the 80s so I included it just for fun.
I think it's really important to mention that this potluck is also Shrek-themed, so i was just doing my part to contribute.
in conclusion, fuck the sun
this was my favorite bind I've done so far! I think I'm starting to get the hang of sewing so that my text block doesn't slide apart before I can glue it, as well as dealing with the various materials in such a way I don't get glue all over everything, or have the hinge gaps too wide, or whatever. I mean I will definitely make those mistakes in the future :P but it's nice to start getting the feel of things in my muscle memory, if that makes sense. this was a fun bind and I'm very pleased with the result, even with all its flaws :)
