Feeling Bullish About Bookbinding

Why not make my own bookcloth? I asked myself this last weekend and realized there was no good reason not to. A pinch of Googling told me the basics- you get some tissue paper, you use some normal fabric, and you have a piece of glass to glue onto to provide a flat/smooth surface. Boom. That's it. Why had I not thought to try sooner?

Backing up a bit, let me just say I've been on a book arts kick. There was a series of books I bound a while ago, and then a couple classes I took at the San Francisco Center for the Book. And then I did a collaborative project with local Kelly and Sarah on the East Coast. We took Suko transcripts from yet another game and turn them into a book for her (vaguely coinciding with her birthday). Alas, my photos of the amazing leatherwork provided by Sarah were so horrible I can't bring myself to post them. Will get better shots from Suko and post them later. Extremely beautiful final product, primarily due to Sarah's elaborate leather cover.

That weekend I decided I'd get around to binding my copy of the book. I'm quite fond of the quote from Contact: "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" I'd sent Sarah two copies of the book and she returned the unused one when she shipped back the final product. For this binding I opted for a safe, normal binding. Nothing fancy, nothing flashy. Just a solid case for my copy of the book.

It turned out reasonably well, given that the spine was quite poorly done. I'm definitely learning. Still learning. Much learning to do. Which means much more binding required. Practice makes perfect. So in addition to binding the Academie book I bound a basic blank notebook. I used exceptionally thick card stock in order to get a reasonable spine width without too many pages. The actual book contents were bound a couple weeks ago. A couple weeks ago I also went to the Center for the Book and cleaned up the Academie book, trimmed the blank pages, and cut the covers.

It was only this last weekend that I decided to tie everything together. Since my blank pages were shiny, I decided I needed some shiny cover to go with it. I found this random piece of shiny/magical looking paper at the bottom of a drawer (from my letter writing itch) and realized neither the grey nor the red book cloth I had on hand would compliment it. Rather than give up or settle, I realized my fantastic collection of fabrics (from my quilting itch) could save me. And they did. I whipped up just the right amount of perfect book cloth and bound the book.

Of course I had just the perfect blue ribbon laying around (from my now constant visits to the local candy store). My hoarding habit pays off! Anyway, it came together nicely. I've had more than one person remark that it's like a mermaid book. My only sadness is that the spine/book cloth got a smudge on it the day I brought it into work to show folks. It lacks that pristine new look now and so I sadly don't think I can sell it on Etsy... not sure what to do with it... but am happy I made it!

Funny how if the light hits it right it looks quite green.... other times it looks a lovely blue.

Spent this Saturday binding yet another book. Will post photos of it later. So happy with this latest bout of crafting. Off to go try and write more prose now for yet another mini book idea... Am definitely looking for more things and reasons to bind something. So if you've got any material you'd like turned into a book, let me know!

All this writing

Life has gone on. The burning wreck that was April bleeding into May has receded into the distance and with the turn taken in June, moving to a lovely new home, I can't even see it in the rear view mirror of life any more. Out of sight, out of mind. So with all of that out of mind I've new things and thoughts rushing in to fill the vacated space.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. A pile of pennies, each individually rather worthless but collected and marveled at none the less by myself like a child with a tiny allowance. Am unsure what to do with them. What does one do with non-actionable ideas and pondered upon questions? I write them down frantically and it makes me happy. My red notebook brings me joy when I simply lay my finger tips upon it. I feel like I'd like to clean up and share my rambling musings in some form but am unsure how to best do so or if it's even a good idea.

But the important thing is that I've already recorded them for myself and in the end that is the only audience I can truly hope or expect to please or perform for. For some reason I thought these ramblings were a new phase, an exciting swell of new ways of thinking... But that's only because my memory is poor and my periods of actual Rebeccian archeology infrequent.

The move required me to fully uproot and transplant myself somewhere else, somewhere smaller and so I was forced to dig up and turn over the top layer of sediment and creation cruft. The churn kicked up many (all?) old sketchbooks and loose leaf doodles and assorted desperately collected gaming detritus. I had the thought today to perhaps prune some of the notebooks- plucking out the "good" sketches and discarding the rest- assuming many blank pages between them. Instead I got a kick to the heart and a rush of memories.

I flipped through two spirals from my time at Cisco, the pages covered in incomprehensible notes about FPGAs and clock signals and truly wandering sketches. I looked into my own youthful gaze, captured in scribbled pen during an evening ride home. The damn things are like paper pensieves.

Another smaller spiral had skinny lists of TODOs and interview notes from yet another job transition. Perhaps I could have done away with that one but it was so small and such a quaint little snapshot of crafting efforts that I tucked it back on the shelf. The next was filled with scribbled text- first pages of prose I have no real recollection of writing (but written with the correct tempo and chalked full enough of alliteration that I could identify it as my own). Then were angry rants and silly musings that felt like a grip about my throat. Those feelings forgotten suddenly back and filling me with indignation or rage or that (now less frequent) strong feeling of distance and alienation.

Finally (flipping backwards as I do and often write) I hit the block of notes for and drafts of letters sent to friends. Dear This. Dear That. Names I still know and message. Names I miss. Names I no longer reflect upon. I didn't read them (I hate dwelling on my written letters once sent- one of the primary reasons I prefer physical to electronic mail) but my eyes couldn't help picking out phrases here and there. Reading backwards I tried to guess (some times with a sense of dread) what name would be at the start. I put that book back on the shelf and declared myself too emotionally exhausted to dare peek into another.

Later. Surely later. I enjoy writing things out by hand in order to think. Surely knowing that they will sit there patiently to return to, legible to me no matter how scribbled, is part of the reason I do so. I think so. I think. I think I need to think a bit more about it later... now onto chicken bones.