#htvvinyl

So this is actually the third cover for this that I made, although only the second text block. The second cover I made came out disastrously, I was fighting the HTV every second of the way and in the end the HTV won. I did come up with a couple of tips though, in case any of you are having the same problems that I did in getting the HTV to stick down.

Preheat the boards. I put my boards together and paste the cloth down before putting on the HTV, because I know I wouldn't be able to ever get it straight if I did it straight to cloth (props to the people who can do this, you're basically magicians to me). So--because the boards dissipate heat in a weird way, you need to preheat the material before trying to stick down the HTV.

The cricut site says to heat the HTV for most materials for 30 seconds, sometimes less. I did 45 seconds every time and this worked way better for me.

Let the material cool entirely before peeling. I let each layer of this cool for 10 minutes (1 biome run of Hades lol) before even trying to peel it up, and at the first sign of trouble I put it back down and did it again for 45 more seconds and then let it sit for another 10 minutes.

I barely had enough of these endpapers to reuse, but I did and they're gorgeous. I love them.

Title page.

It sits so well!

This has definitely been a learning process. I had to remake the boards 3 times before I was finally confident enough to put the cloth on. I think the problem there was that I was using fancy teflon to attach the boards to the spine, because that's how I was taught in class, but the teflon is so slippery that I messed it up almost every time. As soon as I switched to cardstock I got exactly the fit I wanted and it stayed where I put it.

The other problem was my guillotine not cutting straight, which is why the first one came out so wonky. My second one came out a bit smaller because I had to work to get it even. I may have solved the problems with my guillotine (well, not solved, but found a way to work around them) but it means that this book is just slightly smaller than the original.

Original on the left, new one on the right.