Bookmaking

Today, Miranda and I spent the day making books. Actual handmade, hardcover notebooks.

Miranda asked if we could do this yesterday. She has been spending a lot of time lately typing out some of the stories that she has found written by the fans of the same shows she likes. She’s been correcting their grammar: she thinks that these were written in Japanese and then run through Google Translate. She wants to print out her typing and bind it.

So I found an instructable. I read it twice over breakfast and then got Miranda to do the same. I weighed the time we had and suggested that we start with a simple lined notebook, because printing her story out so that the pages all line up would be a multi-hour job itself. Even with only making a notebook, we started around 9:00, and just finished at 5:00.

There were steps where we were gluing and waiting for the glue to dry. Even with blow dryers, that takes time. The hardcovers are foam core, the spine is cardboard, and the covering is a simple plaid material that Tammy had in her collection. Part of me thinks that it’s one of the pieces from Mom’s collection, because it looks very familiar.

In the end, they weren’t perfect, but they are certainly better than I hoped. Now Miranda can figure out how to print her story, and she can do it again, better this time.