/karen/

Something Fishy

Sunday, 22 February, 2009

Fish's birthday was approaching last week, so I ran around semi-frantically last Sunday to find some paper to make him a journal. Amazing Paper is closed on Sundays, and there was no way I was going to make it into the city to check out The Paper Place or even Papier d'Amour in Double Bay (never been to either before). So I dragged poor Ben along to Westfield Eastgardens to check out kikki.K. They do have paper, but it's the plain stuff that you normally get for invitations, and their patterned stuff isn't that nice. It surprises me that there's so much out there, design-wise, angled towards girls, but not so much for guys. Sure, plain is good for guys, but all plain becomes boring; in my amateur design opinion, you need to marry something plain with something tastefully patterned.

Anyway, I was fortunate that upstairs from kikki.K there was Riot Art 'n' Craft which had that Stardream slightly metallic stuff I've used before. Ben was thinking navy, but Riot Art 'n' Craft's range was a bit limited, and there wasn't really anything suitable that would go with navy for endpapers. So I chose brown, which I thought was a Fish-y sort of colour anyway, given the amount of brown he wears. And then I chose some endpapers which matched rather nicely.

This was only the second A5 journal I've ever made and I need to remember that when I cover the boards for the cover with glue, it will warp the board a bit, and the paper, no matter how well I've applied it, will always look like it's got stacks of air bubbles in it. But if I'm patient (and don't freak out about the air bubbles!), the boards tend to settle down and the air bubbles just seem to go away by themselves (well, most of them). Looking at the covers, you wouldn't think I'd made a disaster of it:

The stitching pattern here is like the one I made for my mother for Christmas (except I now realise I never blogged about that ... no time like the present ...) I made my mother's journal with this red and white fuzzy paper I bought from Amazing Paper. And it did the air bubble thing and I freaked, so if you look closely, you can see a few creases where I was trying to “fix” it.

The cover paper was quite girly (no way would you give a book like this to a man!) For contrast, the endpapers were plain black:

And the binding pattern was three lots of three:

I made 10 signatures of four A4 80 gsm pages each. I wanted better quality paper, but at the time, I had to make do as I was running out of time. I don't expect my mum would use it for more than writing though. Anyway, 10 signatures of four A4 80 gsm pages requires just over 2.5 armspans of linen binding thread. (This is good for me to remember for when I make more!) As you can see, I haven't really moved beyond coptic binding; I suspect it's my favourite.

But back to Fish's journal. Like I said, the binding pattern was the same as for my mother's journal. And again, I made 10 signatures of four A4 pages, but this time the paper was 100 gsm. (For those who know little about paper, “gsm” stands for “grams per square metre”. Your run-of-the-mill photocopying/printer paper is usually 80 gsm. Obviously 100 gsm is heavier and thicker.) I bought myself a ream of the stuff as I figured I'd use it all the time for bookbinding. I wanted Fish's journal to have heavier paper as he draws (he did the art on “Going home”), and I figured he might want to use the journal for that. Better-quality paper is nicer ...

For endpapers, I chose this blue paper with a brown pattern on it. They went so well together, even the sales assistant at Riot 'n' Craft remarked upon it.

As you can see, I haven't been very adventurous with my bookbinding yet. I think it's because I think of the skill in purely functional terms—making something I'd want to use to write in, rather than something I'd want to look at, or something beautiful I'd want someone else to have as an artwork. Maybe motivation for that will come one day, but not now ...

(That said, I would like to buy Bookcraft by Heather Weston some day [or mooch it]; I was flipping through it in Kinokuniya the other day and it looked like the sort of bookbinding reference book I could really use ...)

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