#@simply-sithel

[nafeathers]

What did you think of I Saw The TV Glow?

(if you've already posted/shared thoughts, apologies, would love a link reminder)

It feels like a kick in the pants on a personal level.

I really enjoyed it even though I was left feeling kind of hollow after I finished watching it the first time. Great acting from everyone, especially Justice Smith. It's beautifully shot and soundtracked and I've picked up new little things each time I've watched it. I look forward to seeing what Jane Schoenbrun does next.

[little-cat-press]

back in october or so, @simply-sithel sent me a tiny book! She bound my story, Touch Starved, and it is so little and cute!

She made the marbled paper herself! And there is a little loop thingie in case I want to hang it on something.

I'm not sure what size to call this bitty book, but it is Smol. Smaller than my other tiny books by nearly half!

[bowelfly]

Introducing:

Quercus The Magnificent!

behold i've finally brought one of my weevil wizards into the real world. overall for my first articulated art doll i'm super pleased with how it came out. my next one will probably be bigger so that the limbs have a better range of motion though i'm dreading having to hand-stitch even bigger clothes.

also huge thank you to @simply-sithel for the custom magical tomes!

[renegadeguild]

Binderary 2024: Week 2

In the Renegade Bindery Discord Server, we are once again running Binderary during the month of February. Attendance is free, and a link to the 18+ Discord Server can be found on our carrd.

Whether you’re new to the world of bookbinding or an aged veteran, join us for a month of binding fun! This event is all about community & learning, be it trying something new or refining existing skills.

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here's the list of who's running the week 2 workshops:

Mini Monologues & Bind Along with six!: @simply-sithel Double-core French Endband: @no-name-publishing Hidden Fore-Edge Paintings: @duran-binding Hand-dyeing Bookcloth and thread!: @epitomereally Who Needs Tools?: @gargoyleandgremlinpress Imposer Crash Course: @simply-sithel Affinity publisher tutorial (Intermediate): @kate2kat Book Photography: @robins-egg-bindery Foiling the Evil Plot(ter) -- Computer-Aided Heat Transfer Foil: @starblightbindery, @mourningmountainsbindery

[zhalfirin]

Wheels within Wheels - Frank Lantz

My contribution as a binder for the Renegade Guild's Tiny Books Bang 2024 The idea is to split typesetter and bookbinder so I got the chance to bind 2 copies of this text. One for the wonderful @simply-sithel as the typesetter, one for myself.

materials used

case cover - binders board, 1,5 spine stiffener - cardboard leveling material - cardboard covering material - wallaby leather detail painted with acrylic paint) and goat leather cover decoration - hot tooled and partially painted with methylcellulose glue and gouache colours

inner book book body - Schleipen Fly 05, 115gsm endpapers - satogami paper (3 colours) endbands - button hole silk

format: 4,7 cm x 7,2 cm

(See WIP pictures here)

[purplephloxpress]

Did a tiny book bind along for Binderary this year and that was fun! (Shout out to @simply-sithel for hosting, I had a blast!)

So I decided to go even tinier with the leftover scraps and make earrings! (They were very fiddly, there was much swearing, but they are very cute and I love wearing them.) I think I used the flat plastic end of my glue brush more than the actual brush for applying glue to these...

Cover paper of all the tinies was marbled by me! The first tiny book was about 2" tall, and the earrings were all of 1/2".

[mythrilthread]

Another one of the books I did for Tiny Books Bang by Renegade Bindery.

This is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde typeset by @simply-sithel in octodecimo format (with the book being 5x7 cm. Ish).

For this one I went back to a fun time in my life when I used to cut out tiny paper portraits of my friends and family. So the cameos inlaid on the cover are cut out by hand. I also made the Rorschach-esque endpapers. Also, this teeny tiny book is chonky enough to warrant actual sewn endbands, so there they are.

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Last week, I followed along with @simply-sithel's Tiny Book workshop for @renegadepublishing's Binderary again this year, and made a mini font sampler. You can't tell from the pics, but this year's book (on the right) is a big improvement on last year's! The case is straight and not skewed! I trimmed the text block! Badly, but it's trimmed. Not bad for a two-hour sprint.

[no-name-publishing]

Tiny Book? Tiny Book. Pt3.

Previously we covered everything from typesetting and printing, to rounding and backing. Let's continue on with step 4, endbands!

Tiny books part 1; Tiny books part 2

Just like with regular ficbinding, there are layers, and they are:

1 - Typesetting and Imposing 2 - Printing 3 - Cutting, Folding, and Sewing 4 - Gluing, Rounding/Backing, Endbands 5 - Building the Case and Casing In 6 - BOOK

In this part we will be focusing on the rest of step 4, and we'll see how far we get before I run out of photo space tbqh. Please feel free to skip to the area you're interested in most.

4, pt2 - Endbands

Endbands--there isn't anything overly exciting to say here, except that sewn endbands on tiny books isn't impossible, just ridiculously fiddly. For a core I recommend going with embroidery floss, stiffened with PVA. It's a nice relatable scale to the tiny book and will be perfectly firm-yet-flexible with the PVA coating. Because of the thickness I do not recommend using more than one strand of embroidery floss, if that's what you are using right now for your regular books. For all of the examples I include below, they've been sewn in a double core french style with a single strand of satin-finish sewing cotton sewing thread. Here are some examples of ones I've done:

Doable, but at what cost? My sanity. If you've got some to spare though, it will be very impressive to other bookbinders lol.

Don't be fooled into thinking tiny sewn endbands will be quicker or easier than their regular sized counterparts. And as a treat, here is how the tiny endband looked in my press while I sewed:

It's just 🧍‍♂️

In a sewn endband's stead I can recommend using prefab endbands, which will just be snipped to size and glued to the spine. Might be hard to do on tiny books with fewer signatures but not impossible, and it will look... as fine as a prefab endband can. Otherwise what I've really liked doing are paper endbands. I make these a bit wider than my textblock, so that I can trim them down later after they've been glued.

These are made from taking a strip of paper, applying glue around 15mm down the length, and laying down a piece of the PVA-coated embroidery floss. After a moment, to let the paper soften from the moisture and the core material stick a bit, you just roll it up a few times. Go slowly, as it can be finicky. Set aside to let it dry completely, then glue to your spine, as with the prefab ones. Let that dry, and trim to size carefully with your scissors.

(Imagine the pad of sticky notes is our tiny book lol, it's what I had on hand) Anywho it's that easy! I find these so preferable in part because the rolled up core sits forward and covers the folds of my signatures, where prefab endbands usually don't. A tip--while you're coating your floss in PVA, you can take advantage of any remaining glueyness to roll it between your fingers, to remove any hard edges or unevenness from the thread before it's totally dry, and won't transfer any lumps or bumps to your finished paper endband. Once you've glued and trimmed the paper endband to size, you can reshape it with your fingers to remove the pinched ends from the scissors. @simply-sithel got me onto this process and it changed the game for me. She's been my tiny-book mentor 🙏

Referencing this image again, the book on the right has the paper endband, compared to the left, which has a sewn endband. On a regular book endbands are protective, decorative, and offer some support; on a tiny book they are purely decorative. I like to use the accent paper of my case as the paper for the endband, to bring everything together.

5 - Building the case and casing in

SO! We've made it this far, to what I believe are the easiest steps of this whole thing, building the case and casing in. As with my regular sized books I do these tiny ones in a square back bradel binding method. This construction uses a piece of connecting paper across the spine stiffener and allows you to tailor the case to your textblock's unique shape, rather than fiddling with it's exact measurements.

Instead of making this a square back bradel binding tutorial, I will refer you to DAS's video where I learned it myself. The case construction begins around the 13 minute mark. There are no notable different between using this method between regular sized books and tiny books.

The first things to note in this step are your hinge measurements. Whereas on regular books they may be 9-12mm, depending, on tiny books anything much wider than 8mm is noticeable and not strictly necessary. The full range of motion gained from the hinge measurement isn't as important with tiny books, so I recommend staying within the 6-7-8mm range for the aesthetics.

My other note is that the 2mm overhang measurement surrounding the textblock is still preferable, even on this tiny size. Something in your heart will try to make it nearer to scale, like .5mm or less, but this will result in a tiny book that looks badly made. My recommendation is not to go any narrower than 1mm in your overhang measurement. But also this is purely for appearances' sake and I'm not your mom, and even if I was you're (hopefully) an adult. Go nuts and find out what works best for your tastes!

In my experience you also have a slight bit more freedom selecting your cover materials. I've never gotten full-paper cases to work where regular sized books are concerned, but it's been my preference for tiny books. I have so much decorative scraps of paper that otherwise wouldn't have a home with regular books. This is also a great place to use offcuts of bookcloth as well. No gods so rules!!

Here are some photos of the process of building my tiny case on a tiny textblock following the square back bradel method:

Now comes casing in. This part also couldn't be easier imo. I almost feel like I don't need to even say anything. I've found straight PVA, while having too short a worktime for full sized books, is perfect for casing in tiny books. You're brushing over like 2 square inches of paper?? You're using virtually no glue AND it takes 15 seconds?? I can only get so hard. As standard you should use some kind of moisture barrier between your endpages and your textblock while it dries in whatever your press situation looks like. For me these are sheets of plastic stolen from some plastic envelopes you use for archival work. These stop the moisture from going into your textblock and warping it. Some people have luck with parchment paper, but I am not one of them.

If you're using plain PVA, these babies will totally dry in maybe like, 3 or 4 hours. Take them out after an initial nipping time of like 20 minutes and let them dry open.

6 - BOOK

You've got a tiny book!!!

If you have any questions on something I've covered or didn't cover, please don't hesitate to ask!

[fallingsunbindery]

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire 240 pages Completed September 4, 2023

Hello to the TINIEST book I've ever made (or seen in real life). Credit goes to @simply-sithel for the typeset and the wonderful rainbow printing. My eternal sorrow that I received the printed (and cut!!!) pages in mid-April and didn't do a single thing with them until sometime in July.

The finished dimensions of this book are about 1 3/8" wide, 1 5/8" tall, and 3/4" thick. I'm not rightly sure what you'd even call this size but I love it so much, it fits in the palm of my hand and I can almost hide it completely by making a fist. Making the case and endpapers also let me use some paper I've had sitting around since 2020 when I first started bookbinding (though I got distracted and used the same paper for both, oops).

[chubsonthemoon]

Finished binding @that-banhus's fantastic King of Infinite Space today! You ever get into a pairing fresh out of binging a series and read a fic that just solidifies the characters in your head? Like, they go from "funny lil guy I enjoyed watching on TV" to someone who could be real, someone you could know. That was this fic for me--banhus's Hob is such a delight to read, so vibrant and funny and optimistic. And of course Dream's voice in this is just *chef's kiss* pitch perfect.

Some process chatter, under the cut! <3

SIZE

So this was my first go at a quarto size on legal paper (8.5" x 14"), and I LOVE it. This size is perfect for that 10k-15k range, and with the community imposer designed by the lovely folks at @renegadepublishing (thank you, @simply-sithel and Cocoa!), it was such a breeze to figure out the formatting. (Printing, on the other hand, was a bit of a mess since my printer doesn't do duplex for legal sizes, but I figured it out in the end. And hey, I got a bunch of waste sheets out of it! XD)

BINDING

I did a variation of the paperback format I've seen floating around in the Renegade discord (@ashmouthbooks kindly explained it a few months ago, thank you so much!). French link stitching glued with PVA as per usual, although no tapes or mull.

The cover is made of scrapbook paper and is glued directly to the flyleaf (flyleafs? flyleaves?), although as you can see below I added an extra layer of kraft paper to give it more of a "board" feel:

The pictures in this post are of my second/author copy, with an added a half-centimeter hinge so the spine can open more easily. My first copy did not have a hinge so it's a little stiff when you open it, but it gets the job done baha. Now I know for future binds in this size: hinges are the way to go!

DESIGN (or, as I call it, VibesTM)

The first line of this fic has lived rent-free in my brain for months now: They sat at the New Inn until the afternoon melted into evening, the sunlight thickened to a rich orange, and the late crowd began to trickle into the inn in chattering groups. I remember reading it late at night and immediately sitting up and going "oh hell yeah." This fic gives me that "walking to class in the fall semester and feeling the whole world passing you by and you have books to read and papers to write but you see your friend from across the quad and they wave at you and you wave back and everything is okay, maybe, because the leaves are turning and you're going to make it, dammit, you are going to make it" vibes. So the cover paper is from one of Michael's paper packs, called "Autumn Blaze."

HOWEVER, Banhus also mentioned that the paper looks like a sandy beach, and I'm smacking myself over the head for not doing that intentionally because yes! There's a lovely lovely scene at the end where Dream and Hob are lounging on the shore of the Dreaming and are finally, finally figuring it out, and it's wonderful and so atmospheric and I am 100% going to pretend that my paper choice here was tailored for that scene specifically XD

Titling is permanent adhesive vinyl cut by my Cricut, Charlotte, with hand-drawn "bolding" around each letter done with my uniball Signo white gel pen. And since I've been trying to get better at documenting my fonts, the titling for this one was Perpetua Titling MT, and the body was my go-to Garamond my beloved.

As a bonus, here is my first go at binding this fic, but in quarto letter size instead of legal! Smol :3

And that's all for today! Thank you so much, Banhus, for letting me bind your work! It was a pleasure, and I can't wait for you to receive your copy <3

All my love!

[saltyteethbooks]

I decided to do the one book a week for Binderary because I do not live alone therefore I do not have the space to chaotically make a book a day... chaotically because I'm a chaos gremlin.

Anyways, here's the smollest book I've made to date with thanks to @simply-sithel for their typeset of Sun Tzu's Art of War.....which I also accidentally scaled down looool but I can still read it so all's good!

[tru-makes-quilts]

a midwinter gift for @simply-sithel 🤎💚

[eluneth]

Memories of an idyllic autumn walk.

Tiny painting process video here, with warm thanks to @simply-sithel for the (underutilized, but I'm trying to make friends with it) phone mount.

[renegadeguild]

Binderary 2024: Week 4

In the Renegade Bindery Discord Server, we are once again running Binderary during the month of February. Attendance is free, and a link to the 18+ Discord Server can be found on our carrd.

Whether you’re new to the world of bookbinding or an aged veteran, join us for a month of binding fun! This event is all about community & learning, be it trying something new or refining existing skills.

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here's the list of who's running the week 4 workshops:

Cleaning up & converting raster images for cutting machines: @helle-bored Decorative techniques: from paint pen to gold leaf.: @blackoakbindery Rounding/Backing & Chisel trimming: @no-name-publishing Adventures in K118 Tightback Binding: @notwhelmedyet Persian illumination: @narentabindery Monster Books!: @simply-sithel The Last Minute Craft Chat: @gargoyleandgremlinpress

[simply-sithel]

To be briefly meta...

I use Tumblr the way I wish, which might be slightly off the norm-- which itself is probably then the norm. There are no "rules" here, just vague notions of etiquette loosely discussed, questionably agreed upon.

I have the side blog @let-me-show-you-this to reblog that which I like and want to see again. I've a third, private side blog for more fannish things. And I've got this, my main blog- purposely named simply-sithel. It's my work, posted mostly for me to reflect back upon.

Over the last year or so however I've been involved more in other's works- exchanges or gifts or collaborations. While I deeply appreciate the items I receive, I want to avoid a sense of obligation to post them. They're personal, they're mine. But occasionally something is posted here by others and I'd like to better retain it than hoarding them in my drafts, as I have been. Vanity.

So in my vague theme of subject-matter by day, I'll be scheduling things on Friday that originate elsewhere, dropping them in at noon or 3pm PST as whim dictates like I usually do.