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Spent 6 months folding signatures wrong before a retired binder at a craft fair set me straight
I was at a craft fair in Portland back in May watching this older guy bind a book and I noticed he was folding his signatures with the grain running a different direction than mine. Turns out I had been folding perpendicular to the grain on literally every book I made for half a year. My pages were all wavy and I just thought that was normal. Has anyone else had a brutal facepalm moment like that where you realized a basic thing was off from day one?
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vera_palmer19d ago
oh man the "pages were wavy and I thought that was normal" line hit me hard. that's exactly what i went through but with thread tension. i was pulling my thread so tight my spines were all concave and i just thought that's how books were supposed to look. it took a friend at a guild meeting pointing out my covers were bowing inwards for me to realize i was basically strangling my books. the funny thing is once you learn the right way you look back at your old work and wonder how you didn't notice. grain direction is one of those things that seems like a tiny detail but it messes with everything from how pages turn to how long the book lasts.
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wesley38515d ago
Realizes half of learning any craft is just unlearning what you thought was right.
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