Reback Attack

Before I say anything else, here is a link to the AAB blog, where there is a picture of Brenda my teacher, and if you scroll down the last picture of the post is my friend Emilie in the foreground and then me very tiny and fuzzy in the background.

In other news, this is what it looked like this afternoon after it snowed and snowed and snowed and in fact I believe is still snowing even as I write this:

It has snowed for over 24 hours!  Hey, remember how it is May 11?  That...that is pretty funny.  It snowed, I wanna say at LEAST 10 inches, but it keeps melting even as it continues to snow, so it is hard to say.  Anyway.  Crazy.
Okay so here are some bad quality pictures of things I've been working on:
 

This is the before picture of the spine of this random book I got at an antique store for ten bucks. It is a translation of a Erich Maria Remarque novel into Danish.  Maybe Grampa Dee will find it in his stocking this year, who knows :)  Anyway, this picture is to show you that there is a big chunk of spine missing at the top, above the reddish part.  You see?  Big chunk missing?

Oh HO!  Here is the big missign chunk ingeniously replaced with Japanese paper, which I SOMEHOW managed to get a huge paste stain all across so it looks awful, but I don't know how to fix it, so we all have to make a sacred pact to pretend tha tthat  big dark line doesn't exist.  Okay?  Okay.  Now that we have taken that pact, isn't it IMPRESSIVE??  Seriously I still feel  like it is magic when you can just fill in a big hole like that and make the book WHOLE again.  It's really really really cool.

Here's the title page of another work in progress, a copy of The Articles of Faith on loan from Gramma Kay and Grampa Dee.  This one might not get finished for a while because I have to resew it before I can rebind it.  I pulled and dry cleaned it yesterday, and sometime or other I will find time to resew it and then reback it!  Also because there is so little of the spine left Brenda said to just replace it all entirely, and I'm not sure how that goes down exactly, so when I find out I will tell you all about it.

Here's a picture of The Talisman that sort of illustrates how you go about rebacking things.  It involves a whole lot of cutting things up, which seems counter intuitive but generally it seems to work out in the end.  What happened with this book was that I carefully cut the cover fabric away from the board, as shown, and then slid in a piece of Japanese paper (we use Japanese paper for everything because it...is just really great, I guess.  No but for reals it is made of long fiber'd fibers and is really strong and durable and flexible and all kinds of good things. Which is why we use it ALWAYS.) So anyway you get a big piece of Japanese paper, glue it down in that slit and glue the cover fabric back over it, then do the same thing with the other cover, and basically you have the spine of a book all set up.  Then you reattach the text block and glue the original spine piece back down over your new Japanese paper spine and you're basically done.

Here

Here's a fun project Grampa Dee will recognize!  I've asked all my different teachers and more experienced classmates what to do about this book, and finally I have found a really great answer, but it is going to remain a SECRET until I actually do it so that there can be a grand photo unveiling.  Suffice it to say, this book consists of several hundred single sheets, so for a while I thought I was going to have to go through and guard EVERY. SINGLE.  PAGE.  Which I was totally going to do.  But it would have taken about ten years.  But a new solution has been found.  GET EXCITED.

This is what my bench looked like yesterday.  CHAOS. I took a break and cleaned and organized it all up though, so now it is possible to work and get things done.  As Emilie said, now my table is next to godliness.

Remember how I mentioned the Free Box a while ago, and how it is like a thrift store but it is on the street and everything is free?  That is where I got this amazing Timbuk2 messenger bag!  ...I just googled around trying to find what these things generally cost but I couldn't find the same model, but basically, these are totally legit bags!  Anyway I totally love it and it is more fun to carry around than my recyclable grocery bag. :)

Now I am a Real Bookbinder: I have multiple bone folders.  TECHNICALLY I have 2 bone folders and 1 Teflon folder. The big one on the right is my old classic, but today I bought the teeny tiny one on the left to be my sharp turn-in making bone folder, and the Teflon one in the middle just because....I couldn't resist.  I've wanted one since I knew they existed. What could I do?  The amazing thing about the Teflon folders is that with normal bone folders when you rub down a paper with it it burnishes on something it burnishes it, which is great if you mean to burnish something but kind of awful if you don't, so you always have to be careful and put scrap paper between your folder and whatever you want to crease or put pressure on or whatever.  BUT because Teflon is magic, it doesn't burnish!  So I can rub down anything I want with nary a care in the world. It still feels kind of sinful to rub directly on something, I can't believe that it's allowed!

Um well so this evening after class I got a little loopy and decided to mess around with acrylic paints and try my hand at amateur paper marbling.  As you can see, I met with limited success, but it was still pretty fun.  What's even more fun is trying to think what I'm going to do with all these ridiculously colored scrap papers.  Something awesome, obviously.  Anyway, tomorrow Jennifer and I are going to play around with making paste paper, which will undoubtedly be more successful.