it's been hard for me to do anything for a while - it is always hard for me to do anything - so i'm trying to ease myself back into crafting by rebinding the bartimaeous trilogy. or, er, the golem's eye and ptolemy's gate, because i only have an ebook of the amulet of samarkand. (once i acquire a copy, i'll rebind it too.)
i've always been someone who leaves dustjackets on books, but have been considering becoming a jackets-off kind of person. i was dismayed to see how dull the nude version of these books are, though! the cover paper is the color of bare bookboard! i mean, come on! their jackets are so lovely! also, they've got no headbands, which makes them look extra nude.
it's also, of course, perfect-bound glued into a case and bound in paper. pbbbthhhh.
while it'd be fun to go whole hog on these books and do something extravagant to make them like proper magician's tomes, i'm not really at that skill level haha.
i was going to use the cover illustration as an inset on the new cover, but i don't have enough bookcloth for a full cloth bind to have a uniform background for it (and cannot afford more bookcloth for a whiiiiiiiile) so i'm going to put it inside instead. :)
fortunately, my last scrap of dark red is a perfect fit!
each of the three books have a color theme for the spines and endpapers - for samarkand it's dark blue, for golem's eye it's red, and for ptolemy's gate it's dark green. if i had a heap of dark blue bookcloth, i'd do all of them in dark blue to match the dustjackets, but alas! i do not.
so, keeping it simple! uncase the textblock, peel off the covering, redo spine with cloth and cover with decorative paper, glue in illustration, replace endpapers, add ribbon bookmarks (with charms!), add headbands, add mull, put textblock back in case.
instead of peeling out the remaining half-endpaper, i think it'll look good with the illustration - and the thicker paper of the endpaper means that gluing down the illustration won't fuck it up too bad.
i think it'll look nice. i need to figure out what i'm going to do for the new endpapers, though. i don't have a good dark red option at the moment... something to think about. i need to examine my stash.
i used my housemate's hairdryer to help the spine get unwarped a bit so it no longer has a conspicuous dent in it. it's not a perfect fix; if i was more patient, i'd probably round it a little the other way to stop it from collapsing back in again. but i am not patient so i shan't! it'll do. (the hairdryer heats up the glue keeping the book together, which makes it more malleable and makes shifting the position of the pages possible!)
unfortunately i have no silver ribbon (or dark blue? i need to rummage in the box more, i thought i had every color) and silver doesn't look great with dark red. i'm still mulling over what color to do the ribbon bookmark in, and thinking i'll do two - since there's two protagonists and all. maybe white and gold. i have star and moon charms that would look cute as a pair.
i've tentatively picked out a paper for the covers, but i'm a little rankled about it being gold and red when silver is the highlight color on the dustjacket/spine.... but, again, silver and red is a bit of an odd pairing so what can you do.
i'm not loving the white ribbon with the gold. looks weird to me. it needs more time in the oven. also it'd be fun to have a little eye charm for the golem's eye... and an amulet for the first one and. a gate?? for the third?? okay maybe not. i dunno lol. i also haven't picked out headbands!
my craft supplies are still 90% in boxes, so i need to do some unpacking in order to figure out what my options are at the moment.
this week i came into a windfall of scrapbooking paper - i lurk on craigslist for free stuff a lot and managed to go scoop up three boxes full of 12x12 papers from the curb. hundreds of dollars worth! I'M RICH (in paper) - and i'm going to send some along to other members of renegade. some folks have offered swaps, so i should see if any of them have dark red endpapers.
