Posted by bzedan on Jan 20, 2022
In the late 2000s, I was into bookbinding. Books are a very satisfying thing to make and it fit well with the various crafts I was doing at the time. I hadn't really made books since, though once or twice I've turned groups of sketchbook pages or favourite magazine pages into perfect bound collections.
So, of course, I decided that making a friend a hardcover book as a gift was the correct course of action nearly fourteen years later.
We'd been writing fic for/with each other's D&D OCs, as one does, and as the current campaign and logical conclusion of the characters' current story came to an end (not the end, just an end), collecting it all together felt like a celebration of that. Through Tumblr I'd encountered quite a bit of fanbinding through folks reblogging Renegade Publishing, which is, in their words:
a not-for-profit guild of artists engaged in fanbinding—publishing in extremely limited edition fannish works, including fanfiction, meta, original fic, zines and other works. Most works are made in handmade editions of one or two copies.
Some of the work people turn out is amazing and I'm aware enough that I knew this wouldn't be a perfect, beautiful book, but I did want it to be something I was proud of. I based the dimensions on a tiny pocket book of romance stories republished from McClure's in 1897. It's a perfect little size and I copied a lot of the layout choices as well.
I was determined to buy as little as possible since I sit on a wealth of crafting materials so I only picked up chipboard for the cover (it's small so I'm okay with not using the more expensive davy board option) and a ream of 24 lb ivory printer paper. I couldn't find a non-bleached white I liked tbh.
Thanks to the amazing resources at Renegade I dove back in laying the book out. Now, this I've done more recently, I like making ebooks (see: contents of my Itch.io), so it was pretty easy. Printing it was not so easy! But I got it done and I made bookcloth from scratch and sewed my own headbands, and did a raised design on the cover, and the final book was... okay.
It wasn't bad it just wasn't clean enough. This makes sense as this was my first book bound in ages.
So, I resolved to make it again. I could keep the first one, which would be nice for me to have as well. This time around the printing was a nightmare for various reasons (page count had also changed since I added a new story in and also changed a little of the layout). But it got done. And it turned out tidier and I decided I was satisfied.
No homemade bookcloth on this one, I used sticky fabric from Daiso because it was fuzzy and that seemed fancier (also I've wanted a reason to see what it was like for a while). And I decided against the coloured paper on the inside cover. I don't have pretty double-sided paper and it just kept raining here and glue was taking forever to dry.
It was easier to put together the second go, and I'm 100% sold on sewing my own headbands, it's a deeply pleasing and meditative task, especially when using three colours, which requires some careful needle-dancing. I was also smart enough to make the symbol I cut out of chipboard to emboss the cover a little larger this go-round, so it was a cleaner finish.
Some day in the future I'll get a small book press and a chisel because the way I went about it for this run was a lot of work, but whew are clean cut edges satisfying. Anyway, photos:
I've put a couple of the pieces that are in this up on AO3 already and I don't know if I'll put more but if you follow my Twitter or Instagram, you can see a lot of the world the stories are set in and I've collected all my game note-sketches over on Flickr.
I've got one more post about a gift that took up my December to come. I need to maybe this year think of how to space out crafts for all my family-friends for next year, because I really enjoyed pouring love into the things I made this winter.
Thank you as always for your support!
Cross-posted with Patreon.