#bindery blunders

so...this book was pretty cursed, i was plagued by mistakes pretty much every step of the way, but i managed to mostly wrangle it into a passably-okay looking book by the end of it.

starting out strong with the first mistake: printed every single page imposed wrong. remember how i said i try not to throw things out unless there is no conceivable way to reasonably salvage it? yeah...this got tossed. rip, at least i have waste sheets for the rest of the year.

rallied myself for round two of printing, thankfully no errors this time; except in my haste to start sewing, i did an AWFUL job at cutting the pages down and ended up with incredibly uneven pages. not to the point of cutting any text off, but this is still visible in the end product and i simply choose not to see.

strike three! got so fed up with sanding down the textblock by hand that i said fuck it and took it to a belt sander. 3/10 it did sand down but i ended up with some toasted pages. easy fix with more sanding by hand. the answer to everything is more sanding. i will never be free of sanding.

blunder number four: after finally getting nice smooth edges, i started drawing out the design i had in mind for the hidden foredge. in micron pen.

surprise! it's upside down! why does this keep happening to me................

5 stages of grief later, i make my peace with having an upside down bird and redraw it on the other side.

mistake number five, forgot to rub in the graphite on the foredge before burnishing, it is marginally less shiny than the other sides but not super noticable. still, a stupid mistake

mistake number six, put way too much pressure when gauffering the edges and the gold Really did not stick evenly. i am TRYING to ration my leaf, but alas the answer truly is more layers. i give myself a pass on this one since i am still new to tooling

number 7— time for the case, tore it apart and rebuilt it THREE times because i can't do math

#8 we're almost there, one foot over the finish line! ...aaand i misaligned the foiled title. fixed with foil quill and design opportunity.

or: how to recover from fatal errors, in 3 easy excruciatingly painful but achievable steps

so I originally wasn't going to post this book at all, since it's another copy of a fic i've already bound (see here!) but it's taken me on enough of a ride that i figured i'd document it. i'd call it my most cursed bind to date but...i think that title's gonna go my most recent bind.

anyway, i'd just finished marbling the edges of my book, which was nerve-wracking, but ended up going fairly well. i cracked open the book to see how it looked while i was flipping through, and...i was missing a Whole Signature.

Step 1: Wallow

it was not a good day.

there's nothing quite like the despair of realizing a mistake you've made in a project you've already put hours into, and not being able to see a way to easily fix it.

my solution for this is to complain dramatically, and then put the project down and go work on something else for a while. getting some distance from the Great Mistake is really important; because in my panic, there are INFINITE ways to accidentally make the problem worse.

even though there's nothing i can do about Idiot Past Me, laying on the floor for half an hour usually makes me feel better. then i can direct the rest of my frustrated steam onto a different outlet until i feel ready to approach the problem again.

Step 2: Damage Control

picking myself back up is the hardest part. but after i do it, assessing the damage and creating a plan isn't so bad.

i try to avoid having to toss out a project and start over from scratch. most mistakes, even big ones, can be worked out, undone, or covered up. i will only accept defeat if there is no way to conceivably get a readable object out of the end product

luckily, this was not the case for this book. there were a few problems i had to solve first; pulling out some threads and inserting an additional signature is not particularly difficult. i was mostly worried about a) trimming down the size of it to match the rest of the edges and b) how i would cover up the blank edges of the signature, since there would be a gap in the marbling.

Step 3: Intentional Design

this was part of the plan all along i dont know what you're talking about

i decided the best way to cover up the inserted signature would be with a black fire design, similar to how i made the first copy. I wanted this one to just have the marbling, but....yeah that wasn't happening anymore.

I slid the signature in and marked out where i would trim it down to, and after a few tries i got it...not perfect, but to a point where I could live with it. Sewed it back in, reglued the spine, drew on the black with a micron, and good as new.

to really hammer in that yeah this is intentional, i also sewed the endbands to have black parts where the design was.

aaaand here's the finished book!