Pages 38-41 of Making Stuff and Doing Things by Kyle Bravo

I finished the fanbinding for @septemberrie 's Silrah bodyguard AU, Battle Lines, earlier this week and I forgot (of course) to take photos of the process but here is the end result! This has been a learning experience and there are definitely things I want to change for the next binding (the level of detail in the foil for example! Took me d a y s) and I am excited to try again but I am incredibly proud of this first ever full pdf to hardcover book bind!

Disclaimer that the wings and crossed swords were from a Google png search so I did not design but as this is for fully personal use its OK. Unexpectedly it was the swords that caused more problems at foil weeding! Wild. And there are paired birds on the endpapers!

“TOO PRETTY TO BE INSIDE.” (2024)

Final project for Booklab @ UMD. Photos pages from “Miracle Garden” by Farah Al-Qasimi

RATE MY SETUP

The @renegadepublishing Bound Book Exchange is complete and the books I made have been received.

I was very lucky in that my recipient, @rhipidurafan, had multiple amazing picks for fics she'd like to receive and two spoke to me immediately. I got even more lucky when both @neverwaswise and @shinyopals gave me permission to bind their fics for this exchange.

I got less lucky when my Cameo 4 decided it wasn't going to foil my titles and tentacles for me, but I think it came out Not Too Bad doing it by hand.

Ship In A Bottle by Neverwaswise (rated T) is a modern AU for OFMD and it starts with Stede moving into a lighthouse and doing some interior decorating. This decorating scheme influenced my choices for the case where I tried to match the paper to the wallpaper he was installing and the bookcloth and endbands to the orange brick of the interior of the lighthouse. I also knew early on that I wanted to reference the kraken tentacles on the case or end papers, but I couldn't find anything that felt right, so drawing my own tentacles it was. I'm so happy that the two that ended up making a kind of heart shape wrapped around to be on the front of the book.

The Magnus Institute vs the 21st Century by Shinyopals (rated T) is a series of four epistolary fics (well, 3 epistolary fics and one scriptbook style fic). I discovered very early that there is a very disappointing lack of good eye imagery for decorative paper and cloth options. I decided to lean heavily into the fact that the Magnus Institute may be dragged into the 21st century against their wills, but that doesn't mean they won't still keep things as old school as possible. For the emails and IMs, I tried to replicate the fonts that would be used in Outlook and on the cellphones, and then I matched fonts for the scriptbook as well.

But for the titles, I picked out a nice crunchy Punk Typewriter font. My Cameo 4 tried its best to destroy that on the spine, twice getting caught in one space and ruining it. And foiling by hand made it a little extra crunchy but I kind of enjoy the effect that happened. Yes, technically it's not perfect. But by this point I'd already decided on making my own cover paper art as a manila folder with post notes on it, so I actually enjoy the way that the imperfections in the spine titling make it look even more like this book is the result of the archival assistants printing off all the emails and IMs to file hard copies and then needing to hand adjust when the typewriter didn't quite label perfectly.

I also had a lot of fun coming up with some of the things to have on the post notes on the back cover.

And what would a TMA series be without some tea? I made the little tea bookmark and realized I didn't have any particularly tea colored size 10 crochet thread, so I did the reasonable thing and used gold with metallic and it's fancy tea. That's my story.

My Angel friend (see my pinned cosplay photos) made me aware of this one, it’s called The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, written in 1914.  I had never heard of this book, and as I have not read it yet I can’t go in-depth like I did on my previous literature post concerning William Blake, but the plot it sounds like it would be extremely interesting to GO fans, and likely shares some common ground with its themes. It is on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.

In brief, it concerns the fallen rebel angels amassing an army to retake Heaven, but there is a great deal more to it than that. I can’t really go into details without spoilering for everyone (I’ve already spoilered for myself, as I generally do with these things).

It’s a public domain work so is free to read via Project Gutenberg (link here).

This post is also an opportunity for me to big up my friend – as she is a person of varied and specialist interests, she decided that rather than buying a copy she wanted to print and bind her own.

Here are the results of several hours worth of work following downloading the text.  The title page with the Lucifer sigil inside the apple, fonts, page numbering, formatting etc. are all her own.  I think this looks unbelievably professional considering it was done on a home printer with free software. Next comes sewing it together!