solmu

I made a book out of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama!

(which you can listen to here on archive.org)

Bookbinding of Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu, Jan/Feb 2025.

Handmade custom copy of Carmilla using my typeset from the Renegade 2024 Tiny Books Bang! I made my own illustrations for this typeset, which was super fun, and you can find those in a separate post on my blog. Each of the four parts has a section illustration and different decorative margins, two of which you can see in the photos here. I used several pieces of butterfly imagery to reference Carmilla's line about girls being like caterpillars. There are several hidden critters in the margin illustrations. The title page is probably my favorite.

The story is (don't) take this the wrong way by @delimeful and was typeset by @little-cat-press for the Tiny Books Bang. It's a mermaid AU of Sanders Sides (Web Series), which I had never actually heard of before. But when I saw that it was a merperson AU, this idea popped into my head and I knew I had to try it, especially after I read the story and really enjoyed it.

The inspiration is medieval girdle books, which are books whose covering material (typically leather) extended past the book to a knot that was both used as a handle when reading the book and could be tucked into the girdle when the book was not in use, thus the name.

Where my book is much smaller (it's a sextodecimo, about 2.25" by 2.75") it isn't designed to tuck into a belt/girdle, but rather is attached to a bracelet and dangles from the wrist when not in use.

When I think of mermaids, some things that come to mind are fish, treasure, and tridents, and I wanted to incorporate all three in the design. The book is covered in blue bookcloth, and then covered again in crocheted netting that was meant to bring to mind fishnets. I crocheted the netting from cotton-poly sewing thread doubled up. I incorporated a trident into the filet crochet, which is repeated on both the front and back covers. I blocked it on a piece of blotting...board? paper? It's soft and thick and meant to absorb moisture and came with my book press that started life as a flower press.

I then sewed the netting to the bookcloth covering the boards with teeny tiny stitches. It probably took twice as long to crochet the netting as it did to the rest of the binding combined, but I really like how it turned out.

The bracelet I picked to attach the netting to is gold-colored to invoke the idea of sunken treasure. Rather than attaching the netting from one end to the other, I folded both ends to the middle and attached it like that so when you have the book open it lays more nicely.

The design of the endpapers looks like looped thread, and also reminds me of netting. I secured the bookmark to the bottom of the text block and let it hang from the top, which works better when the book is hanging from the wrist and doesn't get caught in the netting. I also sewed a little starfish charm to the end of the bookmark.

Technical details:

Sewn-on endpapers

Rounded but not backed

No headbands (I think I intended to, but forgot and then decided it didn't matter enough to try to pull the cover back off)

Things I liked about this bind:

I really like the girdle-book-on-a-bracelet design, it came out almost exactly how I had envisioned it.

Things I'd like to change/improve for next time:

I wasn't 100% pleased with how trimming went on these. It wasn't terrible, but I probably need to come up with a different solution than just a utility knife and a straight edge.

Crocheting the netting really did take so long. I'm not even done with the netting that's going on my copy yet, which is why all the pics are from the typesetter's copy. Probably would not want to do netting for anything larger than this one was.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

I remember when I first read the book during the pandemic and I ate up all three books within one week - what can I say I'm a sucker for crime stories.

Knowing that a series will be released soon on BBC and Netflix, I had to do a rebind of the first book!

I decided not to include the title on the front cover because I feel like the body cutout leaves a good impression already.

My first concertina! A series of 14 feminist poems by @agest about the way women become myths (where an asexual girl is a unicorn in the same way the moon is a silver mirror, where being a people pleaser is not unlike being a demon and howling at the moon is quite popular with those who have it really rough when menstruating).

Binderary week 2 book 1! Bound the infamous My Immortal, specifically the equally infamous community typeset by @renegadepublishing. I wanted to make the cover look a mix of classy and fun so as to possibly catch passersby unawares if/when they open it XD.

Some photos of my favorite pages included in the post--this thing is a travesty, y'all (complimentary, adoring). I have to say, reading the typeset version of this is only slightly more incomprehensible than reading the actual version of it on ff.net (which I did! Many moons ago, mostly for the fandom history of it all LOL). The folks who did the typesetting did an excellent job of making it somewhat readable while also making it just. The absolute Most.

Here's the bind I did of @mythrilthread's typeset of @psychofink's fic Falling Like a Flip of a Coin.

I picked this one up for Renegade's Tiny Books Bang (after completely failing to typeset anything myself, cry) and immediately knew what I needed to do with it. It needed to be a coin. The story loops, and I wanted the book to have that similar over-and-over vibe, so I took Ril's perfectly reasonable left to right tiny book typeset and printed it so the pages flip up. When you reach the end of the book, the natural action is to flip it over (and start again).

It was quite tedious to punch the spine and cut out the circles; I made a template out of vellum tracing paper to frame the text when punching holes and tracing the circle for cutting. I roughly trimmed the sewn and glued text block with a craft knife, then I clamped it between book boards cut to size (and shape) and finished it with a belt sander. The belt sander (while effective) left the edge a little toasty, so I painted it with acrylic gouache.

The endpapers are mercury glass paper (from a scrapbooking pack), the bookcloth is Duo 105 (Graphite/Brikett/Briquette), the cover decoration is silver iron-on vinyl cut on my cricut. The knotwork design (from the title page) is repeated on front and back.

I used a lot of new techniques on this book, including shaping, sanding, and edge painting. This is also the first book I've made that isn't my usual case structure, as the spine piece was made separately and attached prior to the boards.

The lovely people of Renegade Bindery collected a volume of tumblr “folktales”.

Here’s my spin on it!

A three-piece Bradel binding featuring:

🦀 covers in all the fun shades of tumblr blue with the post that started it all on the back cover;

🦀 logo linoprinted on dark blue linen spine;

🦀 crab party on the endpapers;

🦀 my first attempt at sewing double core endbands;

🦀 edges painted to look like ✨space✨

Fic Binding: leverage by @columbinepurples​ (Daredevil, Matt/Foggy, M, 1.7k.)

Leafy notebook by Advancedtreelover aka Silene

Just getting this done, and some of the glue is still wet, so back in the press it goes after these photos.

It's My Immortal! The Renegade group typeset of the infamous fic.

This typeset is amazing guys I love it so much.

However my printer HATES it and I honestly thought My Immortal had killed my brand new printer for a while. But it's fine now, it just won't print THIS SPECIFICALLY.

So I ended up with like 3/4th printed and the rest just increasingly bad misprints. Half of them are one-sided. So...I had A THEME.

The covers are cheap poly satin scraps from my fabric bin, and surprisingly my printer printed the cover on it PERFECTLY. Paper? No it refused. Satin? No problem. The cover is digitally warped to look misprinted after I figured out I couldn't FORCE it to jam and smear the ink.

I painted the splatters with acrylic and glued on the lace bits...then did a little more painting that went wonky, but yanno. It's a 3 piece bradel binding. The spine is actual bookcloth with lace over it. (Which worked really well, I need to do this again.)