I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess

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First of all. I didn't study anything bookbinding-related at school, so if this process looks amateurly longwinded please bear with me. If there's a better approach to some of the steps please let me know, I'd love to learn more about it :)

While I had professionals to do the printing and binding in the past, this is the first zine I self-printed and hand-bound. The limitations and the freedom of it extended the whole process at least 10 more days than what I had planned. As someone who gets very easily stressed out over the tiniest things, this was a fun and fulfilling learning curve but also very hellish (not too bad for my brain but bad for health).

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1. Initial design:

I wanted to make it a coptic binding, because, just thinking about all the pretty yarns I could choose made me forget how much I suck at sewing. I can't sew. I once bound a guestbook with an electric drill. I can't sew.

Look at all my glorious plans for a beautiful coptic-bound zine and the intricate page setup to have three different yarns for three individual comics.

My head spins just from looking at these photos.

And this is when my 15-year-old printer started misaligning all the comic pages when I tried to print duplex. As I checked the misaligned pages I also realised that, even with a paper weight of 150gsm, the ink from a home inkjet printer is still see-through on the back of the uncoated paper I chose.

Hence the final design that saved me from another round of self-loathing spiral:

I referenced bindings of some art zines and brochures I owned; among them, eyelet and screwpost seemed like the best options for me. They're relatively easy to assemble, and, when paired with French-fold binding, they solve the see-through problem.

2. Cyanotype cover:

I did a crash course in cyanotype before this. The reasons I wanted to use cyanotype are simple: it works with the fickleness of sunlight, is blue (the generally agreed colour of siuanraine), is new to me which means more things to learn, and seems really fun.

This is a print with an exposure time of 7 minutes at around 13:30 on a partly cloudy day:

And this one is of 2 min 30 sec:

Starkly different results:

The 7-min one is closer to what people think of when they think of cyanotype. A very gorgeous shade of blue. But sadly doesn't work with the design I had in mind; it risks turning the whole cover into a noisy mess where every component tries to overpower each other. (There is, after all, an actual lace ribbon on the cover)

2 min 30 sec has just the perfect colour and details:

delish :)

I can't think of a better way to transfer the tactility and intimacy of fabrics onto paper.

Timelapse of the solution reacting with UV light, and you can spot the colour change in the span of 2 min 30 sec:

Here's the entire process from preparing the fabrics to rinsing out the paper (in about 5 days):

Results (perfect pallid lighting paired with my perfect 4k ultra hi-res phone camera):

(My friend, an expert on everything film-negative and photography-related, taught me the importance of hang-drying them. Only I asked her too late because since I started making this zine I dropped off the face of the earth completely. So if you bought the zine and saw some faint blue blotches, I'm very embarrassed but that's probably from me drying them on a glass door; it requires airflow on both sides to settle. Or maybe it's because I used the wrong type of watercolour paper. We'll never know. I don't have an answer for you. But if you know the mechanism in this please comment I desperately need to know.)

3. Printing:

I was reading up on screenprinting for an experiment in my personal project before this, so naturally I thought of it when I started preparing for this zine. Only I didn't have immediate access to a local screenprinting studio at the time, so in the end I resorted to home-printing my files with digitally processed screenprinting halftones.

I think it came out really well!

While laser printers are great for printing text, an inkjet printer is superior to a laser one when it comes to printing images with tiny detail. (Even though the print queue was 40 hours long. It was worth it.)

Here are two tutorials I find useful: Colour separation | Halftone print effect

(both in Photoshop, but the mechanism works on any software that allows channel separation, and if you've prepared files for silkscreen/risograph before, this is basically the same thing; you just need to finish the printing part digitally)

And here's a video of the full printing process, timelapse of assembling and trimming the pages:

The comics were printed on 100gsm uncoated paper instead of 150gsm, as I settled on French-fold binding.

4. Binding:

I wanted to tie a real ribbon on the cover. So I did.

(did you know lace ribbon can also mean lesbian in mandarin :) )

Gradually figuring out each component:

Did I mention I can't sew? But I'd had my hands on 4 different types of yarns beforehand, and I just couldn't let them go.

As the screw post protrudes from the cover once installed, it will eventually dent the belly band that goes over it. I had already decided to bind the belly band altogether anyway, so it just became a perfect excuse for me to fix the ribbon to the zine as well.

Just a tiny little bit on the spine. Nothing too conspicuous.

Four yarns side-by-side comparison:

By the time I was done with all of the zines, I cried at least twice because I couldn't thread or tie a knot correctly, and it just kept coming apart.

I ordered a whole bunch of super cute paper samples and made them into little thank-you cards, sprayed on some fixative so the writing doesn't smudge too much. This was attached to the last page with the screw post.

And here's the final bookbinding video: