Every Kind of Craft

Finally done with my biggest bookbinding project yet! One of my all-time favorite fics, Head In The Lion's Mouth by renwhit. 

I'm really happy with how this came out. I knew I wanted wine and gold as the color scheme. The wine colored damask was a placemat that I harvested and scraped away a lot of deteriorated batting/filling from the inside. The gold is metallic ink that I mixed 1:1 Brass and Bronze, which ended up with a very nice antique gold look. The Brass on its own looks too yellow, especially on page edges.

The typesetting. I tried out being more creative this time 'round. I put in fancy first letters of each chapter, and effect I like a lot. There are sections of the fic that switch to being right-aligned, so I had to add all of that by hand.

The binding! Despite the thickness of the book, I went with my normal method (Sea Lemon's stitch) rather than attempting a curved spine. Unfortunately, somehow when I set the glue on the spine to dry, the text block was weirdly angled and dried uneven. Which meant I spent twice as long (more actually, but I'll get to that) sanding down the edges to be even.

For doing the edges, I tried out applying the metallic ink with a brush (bad idea #1) and sealing it in with beeswax (bad idea #2). It looked good in the press, but when I cracked the pages, it became an uneven ugly mess. That meant...more sanding! Another half hour of sanding later, I did my normal technique of applying the ink with a piece of cloth (so it's drier than with a brush) and leaving it at that.

The title plate. Originally, I wanted to try using an iron-on sheet, but I couldn't get it to peel. Instead, I used normal paper with a single layer of varnish to give it a hint of water resistance and glued it on.

The splatter really added the verve and spunk the book needed. While Danny has wine red blood that splatters on a gold-toed shoe, this book cover inverts it! The wine red is a little more purple than the photos capture.
( More photos... )