theuntamed_mdzs | Fanbinding: Two fics by Brooklinegirl

Here comes the first part of a two part fanbinding post - I hope to get the other part done tomorrow or Sunday at the latest.

So, this post is all about

brooklinegirl’s two fics that I bound this September. I did those alongside two fics for

vesna as I wanted to send them all off together.
Why two fics each? Weeeell... There were some unforeseen circumstances as well as me being someone who really is into fairness and symmetry, so both of them got two fics. XD
That’s also how I ended up doing eight books at the same time – my own copies and the gift copies. Never ever again! I hate cutting cardboard! I hate cutting 16 pieces of cardboard even more!!

Anyway, here’s the whole fucking stack:

Brooklinegirl’s Books

The first one I did was Like a River Flows, a modern with cultivation AU that I loved because of the foreboding atmosphere and the WangXian dynamic.

I’d been in love with this particular decorative paper for a while now (it was the reason I got that whole set of paper in the first place...) and it immediately came to mind when I decided on binding this fic. I love the colours of it and that the dark blue matches the book linen and the ribbon so perfectly!

I do not have any process pictures I think, except for one of all the bound blocks, but it’s not very interesting – they look like all the other process pictures. XD I didn’t hit any major snags in the process of making these books. I tried something new to increase the stability of some of the endpapers; I’ll get to that with the book I actually used it for.

Other than that, it was just a whole lot of cutting stuff. Which I still don’t like. XD I brought the book blocks to the local graphics shop to have the foreedges trimmed so that they’re nice and neat.
I very much enjoy the process of sewing – I never was annoyed by it and felt that I got better with it, too – the pages align more neatly now. Not perfectly (I’d have to get the upper and lower edge trimmed too for that), but much better than in my earlier attempts.

For the endpapers, I used this gorgeous marbled paper I got through etsy from a German shop:

Problem was: because of the grain direction, I could only get three endpapers out of a sheet when I needed four, of course. :( I pondered whether to ignore the grain direction and hope that it wouldn’t come out too “wavy” later, or to try and get this kind of paper again. The shop usually only has one sheet of each, as they’re homemade. I decided against ignoring the grain and went to check the shop.
They didn’t have this exact pattern again, but there was one that’s very similar. I bit lighter in some of the blues, but the pattern is so similar that it isn’t really noticeable if you don’t know what to look for.

So I made brooklinegirl’s book with the perfectly matching papers, and did mine (the pictures above - I think...) with the different ones. You really wouldn’t know if you don’t just jump back and forth between them. As becomes clear by me not really remembering whether those are pictures from my copy or not. XD
I like how the design mirrors the title but is also a bit distorted, fitting the theme of flowing dark energy quite well IMO.

I did a frontispiece for this book, though it’s on the wrong side to be a real frontispiece, but whatever, I can do what I want!

As there’s a high rise in the story that turns out to be an important location, I wanted the picture to reflect this. I found this nice stock image that fit my vision quite well, and then played around in Photoshop with desaturating the colours, adding some cracked glass effects etc.

Then I tried to print this stupid picture. My printer at home did not manage to print this without weird colour lines going through it. Black and white didn’t make it better, it still always came out with very obvious lines. I tried several printers at work which also all messed it up. Still, I was totally set on having this stupid picture in the book, so I finally turned to a colleague to try on her printer (that is the best calibrated printer we have at work). Lo and behold, it managed to print it! There is still a bit of a line in there that doesn’t belong, but it’s far less noticeable than before, so that had to do! XD I was sooo fed up with it! IDK what the problem was, likely that it wasn’t really black and white or grey, but still had a bit of colour in it and all the printers just died trying to transfer that into the colours they had...

I really like the title page design for this and reused it for the beginning and end of the story, too:

I’d quickly settled on this particular font, which is funnily enough called “Blue River”. I always enjoy deciding on title fonts – sometimes I can decide super easily while scrolling through them, sometimes I have to change the title into several fonts to see what I like the most. This one was quite easy.
Please appreciate how I fiddled around with my logo at the bottom to make it stand out a bit from the background. XD
What annoys me though is that, whenever I have initials at the beginning of a chapter, sometimes that first line has a wider space to the next line than all the other lines in the paragraph. It doesn't happen always, so I'm assuming it depends on the font I'm using for the initials. But I have tried so many things by now and still can't get it to change... So, if someone know how to do this in Open Office, please let me know!

I used the coloured thread again, a dark blue that matches very well with the ribbon, headbands (simply dark blue) and linen. I really like the little ornament I used to separate the scenes:

I struggled a bit with the label. I wanted to put it on the spine as I didn’t want to disturb the pattern on the cover. After some deliberation I finally settled on reusing the title page design here, too, foregoing my usual method of tracing the writing or the edges with acrylics. None of the colours I wanted were metallics and so I changed it to this design, which I also like.

The second of brooklinegirl’s fics was All Caught Up, a post-canon fake marriage AU that I simply adore. Lots of great pining while being fake-engaged and trying to be convincing. XD

This was the last fic I completed the typesetting for, and also the one where I struggled the most with the cover design, I think. I finally settled on the grey blossoms:

Yet I was still pondering which colour scheme to go with - blue or red? I had dark blue chiyogami that would fit the winter setting at Cloud Recesses, but I also had nice red chiyogami that would go well with the theme of love and marriage... I had a tendency towards red but couldn’t really settle, so I sent a friend lots of pictures and quite the rant about it all, and her answering text was: “red.”

Okay then. XD

Now I’m really glad about it, the red is really lovely, book linen and ribbon again match very well, and the endpapers with the cranes are really gorgeous:

You can see on the upper one that there is an actual crease in the endpaper. It’s not super awful, but it definitely had something to do with how I pressed the book. This was the first book of that whole batch that actually went into the press and it didn’t happen like that with any of the others, because I tried extra hard to put them in correctly.

What else looks like creases is actually the mull underneath. Chiyogami is very good quality but rather thin, so if you don’t trim the mull close to the edge (which I often don’t do), you’ll see it through. Some patterns hide it, kind of.

I’d mentioned above that I tried to strengthen the endpapers: I added a strip of very thin cloth (“Schirting”, no idea what it’s called in English) to the part that is folded and will be under stress later on. Schirting is very flexible and very thin, a great way to almost invisibly strengthen these places in a book that will see much wear and tear, like the crease where cover meets block.

I really like the title design:

I used lots of official art or art by artists that allow non-commercial use with credit. The font I used for the title is Autography, which I really love. It’s a bit swishy but still easily legible.

Here are two more art pictures (art by Changyang):

I coloured in the red for this scene, as there is unfortunately a dearth of official WangXian wedding night art. XD I’m sure there must be easier ways to do this than I did, but I’m pleased with how it turned out.
And I better be, though, because while doing it, my Photoshop crashed about a hundred times... It really hated me for colouring this picture! No idea why, I’ve done more complicated things with PS than this... Well, I learned to save all the time, at least. XD

Finally, the label for the spine:

I changed the design for this literally last minute. I’d wanted to make the label red and then write the title in silver acrylics and add a silver frame as well. But I could not manage to match that red exactly! I came very close but it was still slightly off, and even with a silver frame, it looked not right. It didn’t match .

So I changed it, scanned the cover design and used that for the title. The red that came closest to the linen I used for the text. As text, it isn’t noticeable that the colour is not 100% correct. I added the silver frame, of course. :) Now, I like this design better than the original idea!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

finch

These are gorgeous! I love the papers you used on both of them, and the blue chapter details.

Also I spent all day losing a fight with a printer so I feel you on that one.