Backing up a bit

Posted on October 14, 2009 by HappyGoth

The books stuff I’m working on now is not the only thing I’ve accomplished, book-wise, over the past month or so. I forgot to take photos, but here’s Master Lorenzo’s elevation gift (no, it’s not magic – he took some and then sent them to me):

ML's book, leafing detail by you.

I’m so happy to finally be able to gift a book to somebody! This one was built on a modified Carolingian bookblock. I attempted to do endbands, then realized I had no idea what I was doing (and started them the night before the event) so I covered them with the cover leather. The cover is attached like a modern case-bound cover, except that I glued the binding cords onto the boards (Davey board) as a hinge. The book is ~15 quires thick, with four folios per quire. I think that adds up to around 120 pages. I’m not sure (I didn’t count them beforehand.

Even if I did glue the spine funny, it looks okay:

ML's book spine detail by you.

It also opens pretty nicely:

ML's book, open by you.

The stitching lies nice and flat and although it’s a bit loose, it lets you open the book far enough without breaking the spine.

I also splurged and bought some really nice marbled papers to use as endpapers:

ML's book, endpapers by you.

The thing I like about endpapers is that although they’re expensive, the books I generally bind are small enough that you get a lot of use out of one sheet. This one came from Sam Flax. The CG has promised to help me learn to make my own in the future.

The final touch was the gilding on the cover:

Master Lorenzo's elevation book by you.

This was very difficult for me. I had read that it was possible to use a cold method to gold-leaf leather, although now I understand that cold really means “less hot.” I also didn’t use glair or another appropriate gilding adhesive, primarily because I didn’t have anything else but PVA but also (in the case of the glair) for the same reason I didn’t use wheat paste – I don’t relish the idea of roaches eating my work later on (they apparently like glair and wheat paste). So I put down PVA and then stuck the gilding to it and then repeated the process until the design was more or less what I wanted.

I must add, for the record, that I’ve never gilded anything before this. While it’s not the job I wanted to do, I think it’s a good job, all things considered.

For the Persian books, I intend on doing hot-stamped gilding, which is apparently necessary. According to Szirmai, it is important to match stamp temperature to your leather. The leather (which is damp from the adhesive under it) shrinks upon application of the heated tool, allowing it to retain the stamp. Different curing processes take different temperatures. For example, chrome-tanned leather is unusable because it requires temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius for collagen shrinkage, temperatures that also scorch the leather. Most others take temperatures between 30 and 60  degrees Celsius. I think I can handle that (I’m so scared to use heated tools because I’m super-clumsy and I am certain to horribly burn/scar myself).

In summary, here’s the materials rundown:

Pages: Canson 28″x32″ 60lb sketch paper, torn four times and then folded.

Board: 4-ply Davey (chip) board

Sewing thread: Irish linen, 2-ply, waxed (using paraffin; I should be using beeswax, but I can’t find it in my craft room at the moment)

Cords: hemp, 4-ply (the stuff you make those hippy bracelets out of)

Endpapers: Italian marbled paper, done in the traditional manner, purchased at Sam Flax. I forget the brand.

Leather: 3mm deerhide, brown, not chrome-tanned, purchased at Tandy Leather. This is much too thick. I have discovered that less than 1.5mm works best.

Gilding: Imitation gold (I don’t know much more about it – it was a cast-off from another designer during grad school)

Adhesive: Archival PVA

Made for: Master Lorenzo Petrucci, OL (for his elevation to the Order of the Laurel, September 2009)

Posted in Cool things, sca | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Endbands!

Posted on October 13, 2009 by HappyGoth

I am in love with endbands. No, really. It was necessary for me to sleep last night, so I had to quit but I didn’t want to.

Also, did you know that if you hunch over something for six hours, you can potentially pinch a nerve and then your chin will become numb? Neither did I.

Anyway. Here’s the endband I’m shooting for:

JA Szirmai, The Archaeology Of Medieval Bookbinding by you.

(From The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding by J.A. Szirmai)

I want that chevron pattern, but so far I’m getting used to the mechanics of it all.

First, I sewed the quires together thusly:

quires stitched by you.

This is the cleanest sewing job I’ve done yet.

Then, I stitched a leather cord to the top of the bookblock, and using two needles each with a different thread color, I proceeded to weave in the colored portion of the endbands:

first bit of end-banding by you.

I’m not doing this the correct way, I realize. That is, the mechanics are correct, but I’m not using the right technique necessary to get the chevron pattern I’m shooting for. I’m not too concerned about this. I think I know what I’m doing wrong and will correct it. I also think that I need one cord per quire, as the two cords I’ve got make the sewing bunchy.

Here’s another view:

first bit of end-banding by you.

You can see the progress I’ve made from where I started (right) to where I’m at  (left). It’s getting better all along.

At any rate, I’ve got two endbands on this book, so I will have more practice.

And in the meantime (thanks to Master Lorenzo), I’ve discovered how to  do the flange cover attachment bit that I couldn’t figure out earlier. I’m moving along nicely.

This website is immensely helpful and educational.

So is this one.

Posted in Cool things, sca | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

(untitled)

Posted on October 13, 2009 by HappyGoth

Before I became a graphic designer, I was a fine artist. I made gigantic collages out of stacks and stacks of the same magazine (all Time, or all fashion magazines, etc) plus these weird contour drawings I painted over with gesso and then re-drew and repainted. I still have them somewhere.

In school, I was both enthralled and disgusted by the art world and its empty sort of discourse. We talked about things without saying anything. I like to joke that the one useful skill I picked up from school was the ability to BS and make it sound believable, at least about art. My talent at post-rationalization is truly astounding, honed by long debates over whether or not a bag of MSG is really an installation piece or what a piece of string nailed to the wall says about the human condition. I’ve gotten to the point where I would really rather not ever have my art displayed publicly (that’s a lie – I’d jump at the chance, if given one) and I don’t read the little descriptions next to art in galleries other than to see what medium the piece was created in (truth – I hate those descriptions).

So when I saw this preview, I was delighted and repulsed all at once. I find this to be so true in such wonderful and awful ways. While it’s poking fun at the art world, the experiences it appears to be mimicking are really on the dot:

(untitled)

Posted in other links | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

What a weekend.

Posted on October 12, 2009 by HappyGoth

No, seriously. I had intended to clean house, which I sort of did, but then I did a lot of other stuff. And while that’s all well and good, I still need to clean my house. Oh, well.

Anyway. Here’s what I did instead of house-cleaning:

1. Worked some more on learning chain-stitch. I find that Hulu is a good motivator. My computer is old and doesn’t handle streaming very well, so I will watch a bit and then do something productive while I wait for the stream to buffer (this happens a lot). Here’s what I got done on Saturday:

design so far by you.

I am pretty happy with the zari work. To my relief, the gold thread is easier to use than the silk, though I did the little spirals with the silk much faster than the rest of the design. I am learning. I plan on purchasing my own needle and possibly a large frame in the near future, as I am pretty decently close to doing something more real with this.

However, the back needs help:

back side by you.

This is where you can see that I’m only just a novice at this, and will need to keep practicing a bit more before I start on it for real. The gold bit on the left (the eye-ish shape) is what it ought to look like. Incidentally, that was the first gold  bit I did.

2. Poked holes in my book quires and did some more research on bindings and end-bands. I also began to make up my documentation for the project, and therefore for its test-run at Magna Faire. Luckily, the bookbinding I’m planning on uses fairly modern case-binding methods, which I’m pretty comfortable with already. Greet (because I know you read this), you’ll be interested to see how the end-bands work; you basically sew the [EDIT] warp (thanks, Greet) threads into the binding of the book, then use two needles to weave the colored bits into the binding over a strip of leather. I think there’s also a bit at the bottom that’s straight-up one-color weaving. This both excites and terrifies me. Here are the quires, ready for sewing:

Persian book, V1, holes punched by you.

There are four sets of holes, which is less than I’m used to. Apparently books like this had as few as two sets, and so it’s pretty common to have trouble dating these texts, since it’s easy to swap out covers. The book doesn’t even attach to its cover using a sewn attachment, either, post-11th century. Weird.

3. Went biking on the Silver Comet Trail.

The husband bought this gigantic garage-made bike off ebay about a month ago.

The giant garage bike by you.

You have to remove the wheels to fit it in the Volvo. It’s nearly three feet longer than my Townie. And he’d never ridden it before, so we decided that a long afternoon bike ride was the way to learn. We drove ourselves out to Mableton and got on the trail (after repairing a flat tube on my bike).

And it was lovely:

on the Silver Comet by you.

on the Silver Comet by you.

(I don’t know what that weird  black thing is at the bottom of the photo. It’s clearly on my lens but I can’t seem to be able to remove it.)

It was sunny and cool and pretty darn awesome. I took a video.

And the thing to realize about the Silver Comet trail (specifically heading towards Powder Springs from the Floyd Rd. entrance) is that it’s deceptive. You start out and it’s great. You’re going downhill and you’re breezing right along and everything is lovely and you’re even taking photos of your husband while riding! Wild! And then you get past Powder Springs and it goes uphill a little bit, but you say, “I can keep going! This is great!” but your husband (wisely) suggests that you use your second wind to turn around and get back to the parking lot. It turns out that your husband is a very smart man. Halfway back, you realize that you had been going downhill all the way before and now you’re going ever so slightly uphill, and three quarters of the way back you think that perhaps your legs will just fall off at the hip and you’ll be stranded, legless, in a really lovely little bit of stony path. And then you do make it back to the parking lot and you go out for a giant slice of chocolate cake and you feel pretty proud of yourself.

But remember that the way back is decidedly uphill.

I plan on getting to the point where that doesn’t matter, because I’m in shape. Even with the legs-about-to-fall-off syndrome, I am glad I did it and plan on doing it again soon (and often).

Today I’m still wrestling with coding, and I’m pretty sure that Java Script hates me.

Posted in Cool things, General stuff, sca | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Moar chain-stitch

Posted on October 9, 2009 by HappyGoth

Plus pizza.

The fiber of today’s friday is not the yarn kind, but instead my current obsession, which is chain-stitch embroidery.

Embroidery and beading on salwar kameez by litlnemo.

(I went looking for examples of this sort of thing, and wanted CC-licensed stuff, and lo and behold this one was the one that popped up! It’s a good example. See the lines and little swirls? That’s what I’m shooting for, eventually. Image from here.)

I am not as good as the above image. But someday I will be. The spiffy part also comes when you hook through the back of the fabric, and  slide a bead onto the stitch on the front. You can do rows of beads this way, or little spangles, or, in my case, tiny pearls (all the tiny little pearls I can manage).

Yeah. This has nothing to do with fiber, but it’s really awesome, and sort of tangentially related. There’s fiber there! Under the embroidery. Yes…

After Tuesday evening and a minor bit of frustration, I took a breather. Last night, just to see what would happen, I picked up the tambour needle and some new, gold thread, and tried it.

I am not slow.

I say this, because it would be wrong to say that I am fast. I am not. However, I got a decent little sampler completed in a relatively short period of time, and am now pretty darn confident that when it comes to embroidering The Big Skirt (my new pet name for my ghagra), I won’t finish six years after I start. My goal is a year, start-to-finish. With any luck, I can do it in six months.

And then tonight we went to the best pizza restaurant ever in all of Atlanta (no, really, it is), and we ate the pizza we bought in roughly 15 minutes, and then we sat around like giant dough-filled lumps for a bit before doing some house cleaning. I think I may eat lentils only tomorrow. Perhaps some wood shavings. I need fiber. The pizzeria is Antico Pizza Napoletana and it’s delicious. The husband is forever on a quest to create the perfect pizza, so he was mesmerized by their wood-fired oven. He timed it, even. It apparently cooks the pies in 2 minutes flat. He was impressed, and mentioned that we’ll need to take the CG by there sometime, so she can see the pizza oven (it’s spiffy!).

But my hugest accomplishment for the weekend is my personal website, which is sort of functioning. Before I knew what I was doing (sort of) I knew just enough to put up a splash page with some link boxes made using the visual interface in Dreamweaver, and it never quite looked right. But now I have a real site! With real navigation! And it sort of works (except for the testing part which I totally broke 10 minutes before leaving work today and also curse you, jquery, because you make no sense yet)!

I will not be touching the Dreamweaver this weekend.

Posted in Fiber Friday, General stuff, india, other links, sca | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

So.

Posted on October 9, 2009 by HappyGoth

I forgot this lovely little webcomic gem yesterday, and so I’m correcting that today:

Wondermark

This comic is so completely brilliant, I can’t even explain it. You’ll have to go look and see for yourself (today’s contemplates the logic of cats, which is always comedy gold. GOLD).

And then on the Fiber Friday front (of which there will be more later), I had a dream last night that I checked the Wollmeise website and there was yarn! Lots! And I bought some! It’s kind of sad that this is the only place I’m able to actually purchase it. Thank you, friends who are generous on birthdays. (I’m not linking there because I’m grumpy that the yarn is always gone WHY IS THE YARN ALWAYS GONE?)

Posted in Fiber Friday, General stuff, knitting | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I love you, internet.

Posted on October 8, 2009 by HappyGoth

So then there was this other exciting thing that I’m learning to do, which is to build webpages, and I just realized that I love CSS. A lot.

But you probably don’t care about that.

Moving along, the top 5 other reasons I love the internet are:

1. Ravelry. Seriously – I use this weekly, although I’m not on message boards, because I don’t do message boards as a general rule. But I still love it.

2. Webcomics. I am a webcomic junkie. I get really sad when I finish reading them (and I read a lot of them). The ones I read daily/weekly are: The Devil’s Panties, Wapsi Square, Girls With Slingshots, Freakangels (updates weekly, on Fridays), Red’s Planet, Hark! A Vagrant (updates weekly-ish), Dar Comic, and Red String. I catch up on Sluggy Freelance in gigantic, marathon-style chunks.

3. Twitter. I am so addicted to Twitter. I check it and update more than I probably should.

4. The Guild. Oh, the Guild. Felicia Day & Co. have successfully made me feel less strange. But it’s free to try! Go try it! Do it now.

5. Hulu. Recently, my husband and I gave up regular TV, mostly because we’re cheap enough to have old sets and too cheap to buy a digital converter. So anything I watch, TV-wise, is either DVD rentals or streamed online via Hulu. This category also encompasses CW TV online, and NBC (I think). Go, free television (it’s the way it should be, no?).

And while there are lots of other things (blogs, flickr, etc), those are my top 5. I have become such an internet junkie. I can honestly say that while I think I could manage back in the lawless days of 1995, when nobody had cell phones and reality TV was not really a big thing and fashion was sort of unfortunate, I would really miss my internet. We didn’t have it at home until after I went to college and had my own computer, so the fact that I have it wherever I want it, over wi-fi sometimes, completely blows my mind. iPhones remain a little unsettling, but awesome.

(And I love this blog because I think when I put tiny monkeys (or text referring to tiny monkey or Lemmy Kilmister) in the body copy somewhere, another random person finds me, which is completely weird.)

Posted in Cool things | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

All righty, then.

Posted on October 7, 2009 by HappyGoth

Remember that thing I said about being distracted easily? It’s so true. Case in point:

sampler. whole frame by you.

That there is tambour embroidery, which I spent a little over an hour working on last night at Project  Night. A while back, I’d made a valiant but frustrating effort to do chain stitch embroidery using a regular needle. It worked, but was immensely time-consuming. In the end, I plan on embroidering enough fabric to make a ghagra out of, and so the time I was looking at in my future for the embroidery seemed to  stretch into the future of the Earth, when the sun becomes a red giant and we’re all gone and the planet is a cinder. I was not enthusiastic.

However, Lea, who is fairly awesome, had a tambour needle in her cache of supplies, and so I was handed a frame, the needle, and some thread to play with. It’s really fiddly. There’s a trick to it, and to not getting your needle caught in the fabric (which happened to me a lot). Apparently you get fast when you get the hang of it, and I sort of got there, where I was doing six stitches every five seconds or so. I think that if I practice some more, I can get to be fairly speedy.

These are my favorite parts of the freeform thing I was making:

sample, curve detail by you.

sampler, the neatest bit by you.

You can see where I’ve caught the thread on itself and where the stitches are kind of loose. Hopefully I’ll do that less and less as I get better. Next I’m going to try a smaller needle and the gold thread (which I plan on using for the zari work of the ghagra) and see how that goes. I’m very stubborn. I will be like this guy someday soon:

Actually, if I can be even half that fast, I’ll be happy.

(I think, in review of this video, my fabric needs to be MUCH tighter than I’ve got it. The tension seems to help the smooth progress of the needle through the fabric.)

In other words, no knitting happened, yet again. But this is like crochet, which is like knitting! So I’m not that far off.

Posted in General stuff, sca | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

[SCA] Aha! Progress!

Posted on October 6, 2009 by HappyGoth

It feels good.

Anyway. I’ve made some progress on the bookbinding front. So far I have cut and folded (and am pressing) all the pages for the test book. I went on an outing this past weekend to purchase leather for the cover and silk for the endbands. Unfortunately, Tandy only had cheap pig skin (they had lots of other leathers, yes, but the key word here is cheap), so I bought some to use until I’m confident with the technique. I imagine that it’s probably not terribly correct to bind an Islamic-style codex in pigskin.  So when I do the actual one, it will be in nice leather, probably a goat or sheepskin. In case you’d like to keep up with this process, here’s the list of things done so far:

1. Shopped for supplies. The full list for this book is: nice sketch paper, thick davey board (4-ply), linen thread, beeswax, bookbinder’s needles, a book press (or something heavy and flat to use instead; other books work well), Sobo glue (the period equivalent is rabbit gum or wheat paste, but I’m not okay with roaches eating the wheat paste and I’m not at a point where I can afford to mess with rabbit gum), a ruler, a cutting mat, thick twine (I use hemp for this), thin leather (1-1.5 oz, preferably not pig, though it was used in European bindings), some leather thong (for the endbands), scrap paper (for the binding), and I think that’s it.

2. Cut (tore) folios and grouped them into quires of 4 folios each. I have 12 quires. According to the Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding, books were between 72 and 150 folios apiece, but I don’t have paper that’s that thin at the moment. Actually, I haven’t researched the paper yet. I’m concentrating on the mechanics.

3. Put folios in the book press until I cut the cover boards.

4. Compiled a list of period sources of technique to supplement the book mentioned above. So far, most of them are in Europe (the available copies, that is). One was at UGA, but it has since mysteriously vanished from my WorldCat list. I will have to locate it again.

Next up is to cut the boards, then sew the folios together. I’m not certain how this goes, and when to attach the endbands. I will have to research it a bit more. The book I’ve got is very thorough; I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

No knitting was done last night. I worked on another project instead, and occasionally looked at the knitting bag wistfully. If all goes well this weekend and I do the cleaning and straightening I need to do in good time, I’ll get some more rows in.

Actually, I’ll probably do that anyway, regardless.

Posted in Cool things, knitting, sca | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Tsock

Posted on October 5, 2009 by HappyGoth

It has occurred to me (well, over the weekend it occurred to me) that while I am thrilled about the artichoke tsock, which I saw and then commented on and then drooled over some more, I have not yet knit the last tsock kit I purchased, which was the Nine Tailors sock. Yeah. I blabbed a lot about that, too. And then I blogged about it, and there was some sort of random (and apparently premature) claim about a cabled sweater of some sort, and then I bought two kits (one of which was gifted to the CG, who knit a lot more on it than I did when she got it), and then the one I kept sat in my stash drawer until I had my realization. Part of this realization came during my attempt to find something new to knit. Why was I going through patterns on Ravelry when I had a perfectly good sock just waiting to be made?

Why? Well, I’ll tell you. Mostly it sat there because I got frustrated. I knew when I bought the kit that it was a little beyond my experience level at the time. I had only really ever knit two  pairs of socks then, neither of which was lace (I don’t count the Socks of Eternity, because they are one step up from a scarf, that is a scarf with heel shaping). I got the pattern and started on the cuff and ripped it out because I screwed up and then repeated that four more times and then stuffed the kit away until I was less angry with it myself.

Since then, I have knit the Rivendell socks, which taught me twisted stitch cabling, the Waving Lace socks, and 3/4 of the Interlocking leaves socks, both of which have taught me how to work with repeated lace patterns. I cast on too many stitches initially with the  cuff, but then fixed that and as of last night I not only finished the cuff but also finished 3 rows of mini-cables and colorwork (!). AND I fixed some mistakes I made in the colorwork, all without frogging back rows, like I usually do. Woo!

Here’s the cuff:

Nine Tailors - Angel cuff by you.

(I realize it is upside-down, but you get the idea. The little round bit at the bottom is the angel’s head, if that helps.)

And here’s what I’ve got of the sock part with the hard stuff:

Nine Tailors - cuff & cabling so far by you.

Woo! Thank you, hideously bad show The Vampire Diaries for being free background noise. I am feeling very accomplished at the moment. I will probably never learn place notation, and will therefore lug around the pattern with me for the duration of knitting the socks, but I know how to do it! Also without using cable needles!

So, yeah. Go, Monday.

Posted in knitting | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments