some haps and some pics

Hello hello.  Today was the dreaded LEATHER PARING day.  You guys, leather paring is so frigging annoying. Either your leather is ripping all over the place and your life is over, or it is taking sooooo looooong and it is never good enough.  Which is to say, I am just not very good at it still and so I feel like I'm not really in control of it, so I am either going at a normal pace and making gaping mistakes, or I am going really slow and careful and it just takes all day.  Either way....it ties for Most Annoying Aspect of Fine Binding.  The other thing it ties with is SANDING.  You do not even want to know how much shiz you have to sand and how many times in order to make one flipping book.  This afternoon I took a break from leather paring for Book#1 to go sand the top of Book#2, because I knew that was the one thing that would make me happy to get back to paring.

Something funny I recently realized is...wow, this sounds really stupid when I put it in words, but for some reason it was a Realization of a New Idea, rather than like, a self-evident piece of obviousness.  Anyway, it struck me that maybe other people have different parts of the bookbinding process that they like, and other parts that they hate, and their preferences don't automatically match up with mine!  I know, stupid and obvious, right?  I think it's just since this is still a relatively new thing I am learning, and not many other people actually exist who do it and have opinions, it feels like...maybe there is only one opinion to have?  I have no idea why I am blogging this, I realize it makes no sense and has no point and is really boring.  See, reading this paragraph is like what it feels like to sand the top edge of a book or pare a leather book cover.  BORING AND ANNOYING.  ...Okay but seriously maybe sanding and paring is someone else's favorite part of bookbinding!  And maybe they totally despise cutting paper and sewing and weaving headbands! CRAZY TOWN.  Okay, Boringstupidville is over, how about I just throw you some pictures?

This is the battleground.  I am proud to note that by the end of the day I had that motivator pared to near-perfection. Which is to say, nothing horrific happened, and I'm gonna cover that shiz tomorrow!  Pop pop!

Oh hey this is a kind of paring stone that I used this time because it is something you just sort of throw together at home and I wanted to test drive it.  My conclusion is: Hey Dad, you and me are going to Home Depot when I get home and doing a Father Daughter Bonding Carpentry Project!  Woo!!  It is just a marble flooring time set into some wood so it doesn't move around and whatnot.  I think we can take it.

Here is the pile of paste paper I made late last night.  It is mostly pretty weird and as I was making it I was thinking, "Wow...this is all pretty weird." Making paste paper is totally fun though, you just make a batch of paste and then mix it with different acrylic paints and then basically just finger paint with it on nice paper.  I went wild making fork lines on most of them. . . not that you can even tell, because this is not a great picture.  Anyway.  Funtimes.

This is a close-up of one of my favorite sheets.  I always end up doing things in the red/pink/gold range and I really like it.  Which is weird, because those are not what I'd call my favorite colors. Maybe I need to stop lying to myself.

 Okay well so...I guess that is it?  Tomorrow I will hopefully finish Book#1...although even as I say that I doubt it, because it always takes longer to do all the finishing up crap than you think it will.  But hopefully I will at least get it COVERED tomorrow, and then do the last fly leaf/paste down stuff over the weekend or on Monday.  I've gotten pretty far with Book#2 and #3.  Next thing to do on #2 is headbands, so maybe I'll take a break tomorrow and do that if all the leather shenanigans get too obnoxious. #3 doesn't even have boards attached yet, so there's a ways to go for him.  I haven't even planned out what leather I'm going to give him yet.  Hmm.  My goal is to make 4 books before I go home, so I probably should at least cut some paper for Book#4!
A final thought--and this is actually something interesting, get excited:  So, one of the adhesives we use in binding and conservation is this stuff called Methyl Cellulose.  Mom and Dad might even notice that I just got a bag of it in powder form from an online vendor, and probably I just left it on the kitchen counter and forgot to take it up to my studio!  Anyway, it is this chemical glue and you use it to size paper or soak the shiz out of old book spines or to glue stuff to other stuff, but guess what OTHER use it has?? According to people in my class, McDonald's uses it to THICKEN THEIR MILKSHAKES! Which sounds like a joke, right?  That is totally what I thought but then they kept talking like they were serious and I was like, Wait for reals?  And they said, yes, for reals.  That is why it is so readily available for bookbinders to use--it is profitable for whoever makes this stuff to keep on making it, because they can sell it to freaking McDonalds.  So.  Anyway.  An apocryphal-sounding factoid that I choose to believe cuz I think it's funny. And I'm going to stop writing things now, because obviously the leather shavings have entered my bloodstream and turned me crazy and I should stop inflicting it on the my-blog-reading public.  Apologies.