Monday, July 30, 2012

A Tale of Two Cities ~ a project

With my newfound fixation for book-binding, I guess I've gotten a bit over-zealous. I figured out the coptic stitch, with the help of this lovely tutorial, I made myself a travel journal; I guess I figured I could do just about anything. So, I rebound my copy of A Tale of Two Cities.

It took me forever (I'd say about forty hours of work total, seriously), but I did it. I didn't want to have to take the time to copy all my notes into a new copy, see? And I've got a BUNCH of notes; from the first time I read the book, for school, throughout the whole thing; and about a third of the way through from my second, closer inspection of it. And it was my dad's before me, and it was utterly falling apart, so I decided to rebind it.
After I'd ripped out the covers completely and peeled off the canvas that was holding the glue-bound pages to the flyleaf, I started by taking a small cup of vinegar, some Q-tips, a pot of boiling water, a knife, some nail polish remover, and a very bright light to work by and dissolving the glue from the spine. Silly me, I figured the pages would've been in signatures (like a composition notebook, the paper folded over and connected in the back) to begin with. But no. As the glue dissolved, the pages fell out into single sheets. Roadblock the first.
So I found some red thread and I arranged the papers into sheets of sixteen and I hand-stitched each page to it's opposite (using a healthy dab of glue to hold the final knot down). Then I used a screw driver to bore some holes in the original covers, an ice-pick to pop the holes in the papers, used the lovely stitch from the tutorial to bind it all together, and viola! It is reborn.




Now I'm just really, really glad it's over.

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