zhalfirin-binds

[zhalfirin-binds]

wip square antiprism box

A last one on how to assemble the lid (for a change I did not forget to take pictures... mostly).

This time I wanted the lid to fit as seamless as possible to the box.

These boxes have a bit variety in how they come together though. At least they do when I make them and I never get them to be really all symmetrical. So I marked one corner and made my adjustments from there to make the lid fit to the box. Same was for the other other pieces. All pieces I had to assemble got marked too before making any adjustments in order to make them fit together in the end.

Next, after cutting a slit into the center of the lid was to prepare the recessed area for the handle. I went for leather again for ease of use (and cleanability... ).

All parts covered and ready to assemble I had to redraw some of my markings because they got cut away or covered up. A thing I was not happy with in the previous boxes was how I positioned the outer and the inset part of the lid and then had to move them in order to get both parts pressed together. Each time they shifted a little bit and didn't fit as neatly as I had wanted them to.

So this time I tried a different way. I cut some thick scrap paper a little less wide (only 1mm less!) as the box was high. Then I rolled it up in a wide roll and used that to support the inset part while gluing the outer lid on top. This is sturdy enough to put some weight on top until the glue starts to stick. I went for 2 smaller ones for initial pressure. That also allowed for a bit of room to not squish the lug. Once it had dried a bit I took the lid carefully off and added another weight, just for good measure and let dry completely.

[zhalfirin-binds]

WIP - Herbst im Mumintal

Finally I got around to do the last moomins book (moominvalley in november). It took me forever to decide on a leather and cover art but at last the leather is pared and on.

The darker parts in the picture above are from where I pressed the moist leather down with thick iron rulers (like 5mm thick!). I like to do that instead of paring to press down the edge of the leather (tbh a combination of paring and pressing down would probably give an even smoother result, but it's not a fine binding and this will do nicely) another up of this method is, that, if the rulers have been placed carefully, they create a nice guide of where to put the cover papers.

Before hot stamping the title I evened out the backside of the spine stiffener. This doesn't need to be done, but I don't like how the spine curves otherwise and I also wasn't sure if my title stamping would fall on the edge of the turn in. If it did, it ended me up with uneven pressure and could possibly ruin the stamping. To prevent that I picked a thin piece of cardboard the thickness of the leather cut it about 1mm more narrow than the spine stiffener (to avoid a visible edge on the covered spine in case there was the smallest bit of skew). I also cut the piece to even out a bit longer. so it covered a bit of the leather turn ins. I do that to cut the leather away and have a perfect fit for the cardboard piece to even out the leather. It's just way easier to cut the leather straight along the inset piece than trying to cut the inset piece the exact shape of the leather.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Details of my bind of L'Esprit de L'Escalier

This was a rather quick and fun bind of a different take on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by Catherynne M. Valente. In this one Orpheus succeeds to bring Eurydice back to the land of the living.

I like how the covers turned out. It's just the title over and over again and in hindsight I like the backside a little better than the front (naturally).

The technique for both sides was stamping the title with brass letters and heated blocking press wherever I felt like it. I tried it blind tooled first, but that barely showed so I went for a white foil instead If you look closely you can see that one cover has been tooled first white then black and the other first black and then white. Both has nice effects, but I find the black over white is easier to read. Another thing I'd do differently the next time is the time when I hot stamp. This time I had the case completely finished. Tooling would have been a lot easier (and adjustable) if I had tooled that cardboard ahead, cut it to size and glued on after that.

Another thing that I noticed is that the boards warp slightly. Out of the 2 options it could warp, this is the favourable one. I'd still rather have it not warp at all. I know the one-sided pasting of (end) papers causes it, but I'm not yet sure how to oppose it. Perhaps the sequence of what is glued to what makes a difference. I shall mark down what exactly I did the next time. Perhaps working from the inside out and letting each of the layers stretch and relax before laminating them on might work.

Speaking of layers. I like how that worked out a lot. 3 layers of board, grey-blue-grey, perhaps red would have been a better choice, seeing how that pops out, but I didn't have a nice red the same shade as the cloth (just as I did not have a blue the shade of the blue board) and I wanted something blue again to take up the colouring of the chapter headers.

For the chapter headers I picked up the idea of steps, first I thought stairs. Following the many pictures of the myth that show Orpheus and Eurydice on their way out of the Underworld. This story is more about how both grow apart though, so I went for a picture to reflect that.

[zhalfirin-binds]

WIP - l'esprit de l'escalier

I recently had a chat with some others from the renegade server about the appeal of grey board and how it can be a choice.

So I wanted to do a simple case. No cloth or paper on the cover, but then I thought, that might be a bit bland so I decided to do a layered board from grey and coloured cardstock.

I prepared both boards at once because it's simpler to cut them to size once they are glued than line them up perfectly to fit. In advance I decided for overlap of the cloth piece from the spine and and cut the blue board more narrow than the grey to make room for that overlap.

I did a test fit and marked up the hinge gap before cutting the cloth back (I had kept it a bit longer for that very purpose) below oyu can see the test fitting and and both sides of the board.

To have it easier I added glue to the the board side and glued in the spine piece. The glue stain on the blue board doesn't matter at all, since it's going to be covered up anyway.

The third layer was added last. Then I gave the boards a quick press and weighed it down to dry.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Square antiprism box

Another box another lid

This time I did not put it in a press and just weighed it down thoroughly!

I went with less build up on the lid. Just the lid, the insert part in a different colour, the handle and piece of paper for decoration.

I often struggle with aligning these decorations nicely. This time I thought of marking them up properly and more importantly, on the sides that I can see when gluing everything down!

The square frame was easy enough. I just drew a cross to get the middle of all the corners marked. I marked the middle of each side on the inside of the lid too and applied glue sparsely to the square frame before gluing it down and doing the tiny turn ins. I took care that at least the tips of the frame would be covered by he inside part of the lid.

While the upper part of the lid dried. I prepared the cut out on the lower part. I had the upper lid slit before covering it, set the handle (this time I went for leather right away) and marked the position on the lower part. Then I carved out roughly the shape of the leather pieces that would go in between the two boards.

For assembly I pulled the leather through the upper lid, made sure it fit the cut out. glued it down first on the upper lid and then I glued up and positioned the inset part of the lid in the box. I used a piece of corrugated board cut to height so the inset part would stick just a little out (no pictures of that sadly) put the upper lid on top and waited for a short moment so the glue would start to stick. Once I could remove the lid without getting the inset part too much out of alignment I put weights on top of the lid part to press the sides down and make the edges of inset part adhere to the upper part without a gap.

To be honest? I start to see why the person I saw making these boxes the first time at, makes such oversized lids. It's just easier to get the inset part right (or at least if its a tiny bit off, that doesn't really stand out).

[zhalfirin-binds]

WIP - square antiprism box

Part II messing up and saving The lid

This one needed saving, badly.

(I forgot to take pictures of all the steps, but I'll share what I have and try my best to fill in the gaps)

All went too well. After cutting and checking the pieces I covered them in cloth and paper, cut the slits and cleaned the excess material off.

I ended up leaving the third square on top out, but there's another one under the visible construction in the pic below, that goes into the box to fasten the lid.

I did a dry fit of the lid band I made from the same cloth I used to cover the box to mark how much room I'd need to sink in the cloth. It's 3 layers of cloth so the band is sturdy and quite thick. Just sandwiching it between the 2 boards would end me up with either a weird bump in the lid or one side of the edges not being glued tot he rest of the lid properly. Since the board is thick it doesn't need to be too neat and I just took out enough material to sink in the cloth ends.

Then I gathered it all and had the fabulous idea of giving it a quick press... Turned out there was too much glue/ too much space for the glue to press through/ too much pressure and I got glue seepage from hell.

The paper was more forgiving about the glue than I could have hoped (yay, for this lokta paper), the cloth was not forgiving at all though.

I tried to clean the glue off, but I didn't really have any success. At all. Eventually I decided to cover it up with a small scrap piece of leather.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Square antiprism box

Part I

(many thanks @queercus-books for finding out what that shape is called XD)

Over a year ago I saw this particular kind of box on the bookbinders fair in Leiden (NL). After having been recently reminded of them, I decided to give it a go and try to reverse engineer them from the pictures I found here (check out her other boxes, they are gorgeous!).

After staring at the original boxes for a bit, it was obvious they were not covered on the inside after gathering them. The pattern was visible in one consecutive pattern. It told me that a) the board was laminate with the patterned paper while still flat and b) the box was made from one piece, not single pieces glued together. For that the corners and edges needed to be scratched, but not cut through.

What stumped me in the beginning was what angle to pick for the walls. Naturally the base of each triangle had to be as long as the sides of the squares it connected to, but a too pointy angle at the tip resulted in long boxes that looked rather twisted than having that bulbous look I was looking for.

The solution (after some more staring and a few more paper models) was 'right angles'! Any square piece of board can be made into this box by marking out the center square and have the walls point away in right angles.

Next I cut away the parts that won't be needed (to make sure I don't cut one of the side walls off, I crossed them out). The net of polyhedrons for this box could look different than this and still give me this shape, but with the way the paper pattern is was not visibly interrupted I'm confident this is the net the Dutch bookbinder has used. (It also wastes the least material)

Now it was scratching the other lines just enough so they would bend nicely, but not get too weak to hold the structure and test assemble. Shallow cuts and test bending every now and then helps to get there (also a metal ruler to keep carving the same line)

Cutting the board half way through ended me up with those gaps though. I''m not sure how much they would show if I dressed them just like that, but I decided to not take the risk and reinforced them with a white paper just in case.

The white paper is really just a white strip of paper long enough to go all around the box and a bit wider than one of the triangles is high so I could have an overlap and reinforcement to the bottom too. Part of why I did this was also to see if covering the body would work as I thought it would. With the angled planes the strip of paper bends up and and down, but in the end it's still one straight strip of paper.

I let it dry a bit before adding another layer, this time with the patterned paper and turn in's on top and bottom. In hindsight I could have cut the turn ins to the inside at an wider angle to avoid them reaching onto the better visible part, but then. this is the first time I made this box so I take that as a lesson learned.

Now all it needs is a base and a lid and I'm done.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Details of my bind of A princess of Mars

Since I kept making small mistakes. Starting with the wrong printing format, then forgetting to adjust the sewing so I could trim (I did not plan for margins quite as large as they are... ). The backing turned a bit wonky too. So I decided I'd try some new things on this book.

I wanted to use the interference colours I have with a different base coat. They come out best with a black or dark ground colouring. Before I used oak gall ink, because that was what I had (and I love to watch the magic happen when it turns from translucent blue to black), but iron, in whatever form, is the last thing you want in a book because it will rust and damage the paper over time.

So I did some testing with a few different inks to check for effect and smudging and eventually switched to a china ink.

The one I got has a really nice black with a slight gloss to it. That should have tipped me off, but I kept going and just painted the edge with the interference colour acrylic ink just to watch how it gathered in the lowest part (I did the front edge with the curve first) and took forever to dry. Trying to help that with a hair dryer only needed me up with a pattern of tiny ripples. When I opened the book I could see the paint had been too thick in some parts and flaked off a bit. I diluted and kept painting, with way better results, eventually, but it's still not completely even on the front edge (the picture here is the 3. or 4. result... I was just tired to keep going at that point). The top and bottom edge look fine though.

Covering the case was a bit of an adventure too for a few reasons. I wanted to avoid and gaps... but first I failed to accurately estimate the stretch of my different papers then I forgot to consider the overlap and figuring out which part should overlap which was a challenge. I went of the green layer that wraps all around the case as top layer so it could cover all pointy edge I had not covered yet. The pointy bits are always the most likely to take damage or get loose. So I had that taken care off. I still have a small spot on the backside that's not the layer it's supposed to be, but it blends in well enough with the other colours.

Another thing that I did not think of was, when I cut the onlays was how overlapping would impact the shape. the yellow was supposed to be a nice slanting hill in the foreground... well, I would have had to keep that in mind for the overlapping toplayer.

I also thought about titling the cover and even got as far as test titling with copper, gold, creme, red and brown (the line between creme and brown, that's red, I know it's turned invisible, bu it is there). None of the results made me overly happy though so I skipped it.

Last thing, but I'm not sure whether it's a mark of the construction or the hinge is too small, the backing not sufficient, is the opening angle of the covers. It opens alright, but when I push the cover a bit down it drags the text block along and it looks like there's too much tension on it to me. I'll have to see for my next binds if I can optimise that.

I liked the spread out design enough to make it a picture for my wall ^^

[zhalfirin-binds]

WIP A princess of Mars

The case I had this bind on my table for almost a year, but it's coming to an end now.

After I came up with a design and the picked my papers I cut the design to size for a case sized template.

Then I cut the template down to the different onlays and the middle sections from the paper I want to use. Luckily I remembered to draw on the backside of the paper and also to turn the template around so I'd end up with the design I wanted and not a mirrored version. It really didn't matter that much here which side was front and which was back. More importantly the templates need all to be in the same orientation in order to fit together in the end.

One of my main worries are still the paper onlays in the hinges, more than one layer of them too. I'll see how they hold up to reading. I hope by pressing in the hinges with pressing boards those layers will hold firm enough.

I started with the cloth parts to have the seams covered and maybe avoid cutting it too close and end up with open cloth edges or strangely straight lines in the case. Those two cloths are almost the same thickness so they even each other out wonderfully

When I started gluing on the paper onlays, I aimed to have as few sharp edges open as possible. The idea was to start with the outer areas and have them each overlapped a bit by the neighbouring layer (In hindsight I should have started a bit lower, but well, I did not).

Another difficulty I ran into was the hinges. My boards are about 2,4mm thick, not an issue per se (except for one paper was really not into sticking to the board) but apparently working the paper down and over the spine, messed with the angle and lengths and I had to adjust the onlays to not end up with uncovered board.

I did not consider that I'd need a slightly different approach to avoid 'steps' in the design. when I drew this all up it was all flowing one field into another. It's not quite like that now that I finished. I think perhaps drawing on the front might have been a better choice after all, cut the mark away along the line where there is no overlap and leave the mark where there is overlap to know where you want to glue. I think that would be my approach should I do something similar again.

Of course, despite leaving room for overlap I ended up with a gap. I blame paper grain and unreasonable stretching or lack of it for this. It's not too obvious though and doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Backing a book with mull

While pretty much any cloth supports the spine area of a binding the starched mull often used by bookbinders has a few specialties.

Unlike pretty much EVERY other material the mull is used with the warp thread across the spine, not parallel to it!

This is to further increase the stability of the spine construction and also helps with the book opening nicely. There are different qualities to be found with the open weave mull I use. The simplest one is: 1 warp | 1 weave thread the next stronger one: 2 warp | 1 weave thread and the strongest one (afaik) 3 warp | 1 weave thread

This allows the mull to be torn to size easily along the weave thread.

Now when I have mull all along the spine it can happen to 'peek' out under the endpapers after casing in and pasting down. To avoid that I cut the ends at a slight angle. It's really not much but that will hide the edges of the mull and give a clean look all around the endpapers.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Dated organizer to blank notebook

I'm re-filling organizers from 2023 for a friend with blank paper. The inner book is just made up from copy paper, perfect bound and cut to size. The covers were too pretty to throw away though. So I cleaned them out and removed all the things my friend didn't like. When taking the books apart, I accidentally got off too much of the board of one of them, which would have resulted in a very visible step. So I decided to fill it in with some cardboard, pressed it in and was done with the repairs there.

The other one had a front flap that never quite fit when there were too many additional notes tugged inside. So my friend asked to get rid of that. The flap was a 2 pieced thing consisting of a piece of board as wide as the book block was thick, to get a solid and firm front and the flap that had 2 magnets inside to keep the flap from dangling. I kept the board for covering the front and cut the rest off. The I peeled off the board of the front piece to get some spare paper to make turn ins. With this book that was pretty easily done. Whatever they used to glue the paper in place, id did not stick too well to the board.

[zhalfirin-binds]

French double core endband as described in Greenfield and Hille's 'Headbands: How to work them'

I'm not entirely sure I did them right. The endband I was introduced to as French double core a few years back had 2 cores, but somehow I ended up with 3. Despite leaving some room for improvement, I kind of like how it came out though and for the first (the other one is still waiting to be done) I'm happy. It worked way better than anticipated.

The start was a bit fiddly, but after a few tie downs it got better.

I used a 2 mm and a 1 mm leather string for cores and a 'working thread' (which is not what the thread being wrapped around the cores is called in the book, but a secret different thread that becomes the bead). Next time I go for a smoother thread though. The 2mm is a bit coarse and the silk catches on it. I guess that's why they usually use bâtonnets made from paper. They just don't have any rough parts for the thread to catch on.

Only the backside looks a bit like a mess, but then, no one is going to see that when I'm done.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Box making - the lid

I built the box with the lid meant to sit level with the outside walls of the box and figured, easiest to just use one sort of paper and get this quickly finished. But then I had the splendid idea 'What if the colours would alternate?'

Of course I'd have to use the cloth again then and there were some hindrances like, the lid was rather tight fitting at the corners already. so I could not have any thicker material like cloth there.

But also, the lid was so neatly sunken in, I didn't want it to stick out so the cloth needed to be sunken in to avoid that. I carved out a cloth thick layer from the both sides of the lid board just tiny bit more than the paper on box was wide to sink the cloth in.

gave it a quick dry fit (which it passed) and glued it in.

Naturally I realised right after I had everything glued in place and dry, that it would have been much smarter and easier to work with, to do the whole length...

Now I had to deal with a fucked up paper shape for the upside and really unneeded stretch in the direction where I could not afford it. I decided to role with what I had now and came up with this wonderful cover paper meant to just fit perfectly after I guestimated the length and the needed cut outs and worked with the tiniest overlap to the sides.

Surprisingly this was not my worst decision in bookbinding/box making and it worked better than expected. Not perfect, but still.

Out of 4 corners only 1 had a tiny gap!

Next up was something to lift the lid. I had a monkeys fist lying around that I made some time ago and decided to use that. It took a bit convincing to get the cords through the small, punched out hole in the lid and frayed the cords , like I'd do with a book sewn on cords so the rather thick thread would glue down as flat as possible.

Now all that was left was cutting a piece of paper to size for the inside, gluing down the frayed cords and the paper and let it all dry weighed down to avoid warping . In the top picture of the finished lid you can see how bad it warps while the paper is still damp, so behold the dry stack meant to convinces the board to dry out flat.

[zhalfirin-binds]

box making

Fixing minor issues

I had 2 issues with this box.

For one the length of the paper was hard to calculate and I'm not much for calculating anyway, so I ended up with uneven edges. Which is not a big thing, but it annoyed me.

Since I worked with a coated book cloth (which is always pretty forgiving) the fix for that was simple enough. I took the width of larger edges with one of those 2 pointed compasses,

and used that to mark the cut line on the completely dried out paper.

Now all I had to do was to peel away the paper and clean the cloth a bit.

The other was board flashing through where I had cut the corners a tat too short.

I just dabbed some paint into the gap, wiped the excess paint on the cloth of and now it's pretty much invisible

[zhalfirin-binds]

Paper can stretch a lot.

I keep forgetting how much that can be and working with elephant hide paper is good at reminding me.

Above you see dry paper on left, dampened paper on the right, you can clearly see the difference in height

Below you see: on one side dampened paper on the left (note how its curling up, I moistened the other side too and waited until it relaxed again), dampened paper on the right

Below both papers are dampened and have relaxed, they are not the same height

This also shows another reason why one should pay attention of grain direction in endpapers really well, I think. If the paper stretches out front, as it does with grain direction parallel to the spine, that stretch is not much of a problem.

If it spreads towards head and tail, it sort of fans out and creates a weird waviness in the endpaper.

[zhalfirin-binds]

Covering a box with inset lid (lid is still missing though) (BE WARNED: This is not a beginner friendly version with smaller bits and more time to work before glue dries)

After cutting everything mostly to size, I started out covering the bottom and the narrow sides.

Then I cut free the corners of the bottom and covered the edges around the bottom

There's not much to those bottom corners though. No jig, no complicated maths to do, I just took my scissors and snipped off the corner. The only thing to be careful about is, not to snip too close the corner, if there's a tiny bit of cloth left it's perfect.

The finicky part was when I got the upper edges when I had to do the turn-ins. I forgot that I would have to adjust my cutting for that inner step part and hadn't dry-run it before. Well, there was no dry run possible now since the cloth was all glued up already and I had to remember quickly.

It worked well enough though. Next to go in was the bottom piece. I picked a coated cloth because I wanted something sturdy and durable that can be wiped down (much less stressing about glue stains that way!)

I pre-cut the bottom piece just a liiiittle too large, so the corners would run up the sides a bit. Usually I'd do it a bit different, but in this case I will have paper go down all the way to the bottom, so I decided it was okay to cut it this close.

Now I went to cover the walls. I used something called elephant hide paper (in direct translation). It was, and in parts still is, commonly used for library bindings because it's pretty sturdy, can be cleaned with a damp cloth, is somewhat water resistant and doesn't look grubby quickly.

If one gets to use it, I think it's also nice to work with because, unlike other papers, it doesn't tear quickly either. There is just one thing one needs to keep in mind. It's a thirsty paper, best to dampen it before using or it will curl up terribly and might even get glue on the show-side due to that curling.

It also stretches quite a bit so that needs to be expected too. On the upside, once moistened one can do a fitting test, see if it's cut short enough and adjust, if need be. It won't stretch any further with glue applied and it's still sturdy enough for creasing for example.

I started with the narrow sides again and this time had a proper overlap to the side walls to have the corners covered and no board flashing through. Last parts were the long sides which were glued in one piece from inside out. Starting at the very bottom inside the box, working in the step and then have the paper run down on the outside to end a few mm short of the edge.

[zhalfirin-binds]

WIP - The Grief of Stones (nothing special about the process, so i have no pictures of that)

Only a shot of my somewhat rumpled backing. (I did not do my best job there, but well, it is what is now.)