I take the words. I scatter them in time and space

I completely disassembled the textblock, repaired every single sheet with Japanese tissue paper, lamented my inability to clean up the staining on the pages, reassembled the textblock, sewing it on cords (with the original front cover in a special paper envelope), painted the edges, rounded and backed the block, and sewn the endbands.

Then I assembled the cover — this is laced-in boards with faux cords (over the real ones), in leather and linen. The illustration is a self-portrait of Tove Jansson that I copied as an etching and printed on Super Alpha paper using a real etching press (I do have the print of this illustration bought in the Moomim museum in Tampere but it's way bigger than what I needed). The cord I used as a frame for the cutout is also woven by hand because why not.

The cloth-hinged endpapers use Jansson's cover illustrations for the four stories included in this book: Comet in Moominland, Finn Family Moomintroll, The Exploits of Moominpappa, and Moominsummer Madness.

Additional pictures of the “before” and the process.

Wow, so this fic agonized me for the longest time for multiple different reasons. Lots of good things happened but a few setbacks happened as well.

For starters, I couldn't make up my mind about the cover OR interior design. At first I wanted to make reference to the "heart, don't forget" part that immediately precedes the titular "something like that" lyrics and I aimed for a sort of "ribbon around the finger" theme but really hated the way it looked. In the end i settled on something adjacent to the red string of fate. In part because I'm still have a lot of fun embroidering the cover for stuff and wanted to chose a theme I could easily (well, not easily) translate into embroidery. I love the way it looks at the end, so the extra time to deliberate was definitely worth it.

As far as the actual text block goes - I made a book press!

No more badly cut wooden scraps between clamps for me. This thing is great, and maybe one day Ill splurge on a proper commercial press but for now this does the job perfect. I really wanted to be able to do painted edges and I knew i had to be able to clamp the textblock as hard as possible which I wasn't going to accomplish with my previous set up. And the painted edges turned out great! This is just regular acrylic mixed with water and painted on in layers. I'll admit to a bit of bleeding, but I think that's because on the first side I tried, I didn't sand it enough, because the other two sides were perfectly fine.

The other thing I accomplished on this bind which I haven't previouslty is a real sewn headband, which took me several frustrating attempts to do but I managed a servicable enough attempt. This is with fairly heavy gauge string, using the woven innards of a piece of cotton rope as the core. Next time I'll downsize the thread gauge and maybe do two colors instead.

Now onto the bad....

When I stared this bind I still had my shitty vevor guillotine and I knew it wouldn't cut it (no pun intended), so I swapped it for this 12" Hardware Factory cutter which I highly highly reccomend. This thing cuts through paper like butter. You know what else it cuts through like butter? My finger. Because I seriously miscalcuated HOW sharp this thing is, and in my haste to use my brand new toy my thumb went a little too close to the blade while adjusting the position of the text block and sliced off my fingernail and a decent amount of the skin beneath. So that set me back about 2 weeks because I simply couldn't use my right hand for anything.

Once I had my dexterity back, I was able to actually get to the embroidery for the cover. The hands actually weren't that hard to embroider. I drew what I wanted on my iPad and then just traced it onto the bookcloth. Then it was just a matter of lining everything up. The white fabric I used was very thin, however, and the brown colored stiff board I used for the covers darkened the fabric too much so I pasted a sheet of white paper down beneath the fabric to keep it nice and white.

But I did kind of a crappy job and the paper wasn't big enough. So near the edge, the brown board still shows through if you look close.

Also, you can see where the back end of the embroidery thread was flopping about and is visible through the white fabric.

On my last bind I did some fancy, overkill cutting to make sure the thread on the back of the embroidery didn't make the cover too bumpy, which gave me mixed results. So this time I didn't bother. All I did was glue the tied off ends of the thread down, but I missed this one, so it's still visible. I know better for next time!

And lastly, for the second time..... the spine is not on centered. 😭 I just didn't line it up well enough and by the time I noticed (mere seconds later) I didn't want to pull it back and ruin the alreayd drying glue. So off-centered it is.