Sketchbook

Yay bookbinding! I finally photographed this. This is my third hardcover and all kinds of new techniques were tried out on this one. The cover is actually made using super cheap white walmart fabric that I printed the designs on. I think there's some kind of product you're supposed to put on fabric before running it through an inkjet printer (bubble jet set or something). However I was pretty determined to slap this together posthaste with whatever materials were most easily accessible, so of course I didn't use any of that. I really just wanted to see if my plans of a custom-printed cover would work. I think I'll try to find some next time though because the ink does look like it's rubbed off some in places, and generally has a bit of a dull look to it (which may be in part because I went with an off-white fabric from the discount bin). I did spray fixative on it though, and that did some good. I also tried backing the fabric with paper, because I've had issues with glue seeping through fabric on covers before (and it was kind of necessary to get it through the printer). The paper I used was definitely too thick, and there'll be some more experimentation before I find just the right thing. I like the metal corner things okay I guess, but I don't think I'll be using them next time. They wear on the corners of the paper a bit, which you can probably see in one of the pictures here. I partially just added them in hopes of distracting from how I accidentally cut the cover material's edges way too short. xD But I was proud of getting the edges of the actual book block fairly nice and even this time. That was accomplished by clamping it together and sanding all the edges like it was a block of wood.

The endsheets are a modified version of textures I used for some of my LaF pages (and were poorly lined up when being glued into the book, oops). If you can read the writing on that page where the book is open and actually want to, go for it, but it's just a bunch of notes to remember for the next bookbinding project I do. It just says things like what kind of glue to use on what and "possibly build an actual press" _{which I probably won't actually do anytime too soon because a giant stack of heavy books is totally adequate, right???}

 The cover image is a slightly modified version of an awesome commission I got a long time ago from , used with permission of course (original here: fav.me/d5lnvt3 ) I got the resources for the background textures from here: lostandtaken.com/gallery/tag/b… really cool stuff in there.

I made this during the later part of the last semester. This was one of those projects I just sort of couldn't stop working on once I started. It has a ton of flaws, but I think I can solve a lot of them next time by just calming the heck down during the work process and not rushing quite so much. xD