#bookbinding journal

I tried my hand at making some notebooks! They're not perfect but for my second binding attempt they are really great. I will be looking to invest in a heavy duty guillotine cutter though on behalf of my wrist 😅😅😅

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First attempt at bookbinding: “corrina, corrina“ on AO3 by curlymcclain! Thanks a lot for giving me permission to make this and for writing this wonderful fic :))

This is just a record of what I did during the process for future reference and those interested (long post ahead)

Text Formatting

Followed this tutorial by @/ArmoredSuperHeavy: (so helpful; wouldn’t have done anything without it): https://docs.google.com/document/d/11JyVxeRS8yEWgCYrNMUPlNrEbR5AAD3Z2aDP-QXEP3Y/ 

I decided to use 7.75” x 11” paper folded in half, cutting ⅜’’ off the top and bottom edges of normal letter-sized paper. Pretty worth it b/c I needed to trim the edges after binding anyway.

Used Garamond size 11.5 font. Ended up with 84 pages total; I couldn’t reasonably fit it in 72, 80, or 96. Signatures were 20-20-20-24.

Apparently, I spent 595 minutes total editing the original Word document… It was really fun though! (seriously, the first several hours on the word doc, i was the most excited i had been in a while)

Note to future self: be careful with Word’s automatic table of contents and check for accidental new lines at the beginning of pages.

Printing

Turns out, my home printer prints faint text and smears a little.

So, I tested the school printers (yes, I test-printed fanfiction in the school library). The front and back of sheets didn’t line up (shows badly in the header). Fail.

Ended up using our 6-year old discarded black-and-white printer that we dumped at an office, which worked perfectly!

Used 92 brightness 20 lb paper (default). Never realized that printer paper was so see-through, but it’s good for books (yay!).

I was concerned about the paper grain facing the “wrong way”, but didn’t have anything else. I heard that it should be alright since the paper is relatively thin?

Hole Punching

Created a guide with thicker paper, laid on top. Push-pin to poke the holes. Binder clips to keep everything together. Propped the folded pages on an open sketchbook. Worked great, but poked holes into the inside spine of the sketchbook. Whoops.

Holes seemed to move a bit between signatures, not sure why. Mostly gets covered up during stitching though.

I later found out that you can punch holes with the paper face-down on top of corrugated cardboard. Will most definitely be doing this next time.

Text Block Stitching

Used the kettle/link method by Sea Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O4kFTOEh6k 

Used doubled-up thin white thread and waxed it with a candle.

Bound a bit loose for the first few signatures, but the last one was good. Knots and ends were a bit sloppy (kept sticking into the book). Accidentally hooked up the bottom line of stitches on the outside spine.

Note from the future: this had literally zero impact

Glueing the Spine

Elmer’s Glue + Binder Clips + parchment paper + hardcover book cover & clipboard. No mull.

Glue seeped in a tad bit between signatures, so those pages seemed a bit more “stuck together”.

This is when I realized that this had to be hardcover due to the way I bound it (falls open too easily for paperback).

Endpages

Luckily, I acquired some dark blue paper from the unused-paper-pile in an office. All of the other colors were light and didn’t go well with the planned beige cover, so light-dark contrast here we go.

Interestingly, I think this paper had the grain in both directions, kind of like the texture of canvas cloth up close.

Then, I put more glue on the spine and laid a piece of paper over it.

Trimming Edges

This step got delayed a week due to my inability to acquire a craft knife.

This was definitely the hardest part, since I've never used a paper-cutting knife before (other than 6th grade technology class), let alone on a stack of 46 pages.

Some edges were a bit uneven, but nothing majorly bad happened (that's a win). 

I went back later to fix the worse parts and used a nail file on some weird areas. One is probably not supposed to nail-file paper, but it worked…

The trimmed block of text:

Making the Cover

Used this tutorial from Sea Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_rU-yOPd4

I used cardboard from a cereal box because all the other cardboard around was corrugated. And beige cardstock as the "bookcloth" (also taken from the aforementioned office).

Cutting out the cardboard took way longer than it should have, because I kept cutting away from the ruler. Doubled up the cardboard on the spine, which I forgot to include in later calculations, so the cover ended up ~1.5 mm short on width. I glued the covers and spine on a piece of printer paper first in order to have them spaced apart correctly

The beige cardstock was only letter-size, so I had to glue two pieces together with a 7-8 mm overlap. Required some math to figure out where to put the cover title.

Then, I just glued the pieces of cardboard onto the beige paper and folded it up. I was originally worried, since beige cardstock is very different than bookcloth, but it honestly turned out as well as it could have. 

The book cover (not sponsored):

(the white paper around the spine is the printer paper)

Final Glueing

This step was pretty simple, though I forgot the fact that glue is wet, and some moisture seeped into the first/last few pages and made them a bit wavy (this all happened in ten minutes). To remedy this, I put tissues between a bunch of pages and pressed it overnight, which actually worked; the pages are no longer wavy. Downside is that the cover got warped inwards a bit (concave up). 

The next day, I used a hairdryer, which I probably could’ve done before. Then pressed it without anything inside for a few hours and it flattened out. The pages aren’t completely flat, but otherwise, it pretty much looks like a book :D

I also got a lot of guidance on several steps from rerurumo’s bookbinding videos, so thanks to them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XCvTZRVbgg

More photos:

the unintended seam on the front cover:

the back cover seam:

the thing that my elementary teacher said not to do to books:

some pages:

noo the book isn’t perfectly flat D:

the stack of books used to press down:

link to main post

about the process of making this:

long post under cut

I made a blank notebook with perfect-binding as a test run following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKojHFky150 

long post w/ details under cut: