The problem I’m having is wrinkles.
I’d been binding books for a while when it struck me: doing some collage book covers would probably be really cool. With book binding, I often tried to think of ways to change it up, make books that were a little different, maybe a bit more of a challenge than it would be just to do the same painted covers over and over again ad nauseum. I remembered rd95’s post. It had piqued my interest. I also recalled a summer art class where we had collected images and created a personal journal with a collage front. For my theme I’d chosen eyes. I’d had a lot of fun for a few weeks on Pinterest once, building a board that consisted solely of all “red things.” I liked how collages made one image out of a collection of similar things, but “similar” could be sliced any way that you could want. There was a very flexible potential.
So I collected magazines for some months. When I filled up a box I figured I had enough. While I waited I found my copies of old Martha Stewart Living - October issues. I made two simple Halloween collage-scenes. I really liked how they turned out, and had fun making them. It seemed almost too easy. Decoupage had to need more precision, planning, and deliberate laying than that, right?
Imgur won’t let me rotate this image - the finished covers, glued, glosses, and dried, bound into 2 books with painted/glossed black back covers
detail cover one - before gluing
detail cover two - before gluing
One night I went through the pile of magazines. It turned out most of them were food-related, one way or another. I thought a food collage cover would be so perfect for people to write recipes in. I thought, maybe it was a marketing angle. I thought I should start binding the books with lined paper if I wanted that to really do well. Who writes recipes on blank paper? It’d be way too uneven and messy, unless you were really perfect at writing freehand.
I started to tear out food pictures I liked.
I ended up with enough for two full covers. Both were berry abundant, although the theme was really only pronounced and unifying, I felt, in one. The other cover was more “generic desserts.” I figured it’d be the back cover and wouldn’t matter.
front cover - glued with fixative- some wrinkling visible
After trimming each piece around 3x, I started to glue them down. I used Modgepodge. I smoothed every piece down with my bone folder after I affixed it. If these collages rippled, they wouldn’t be any good as covers. When I put both covers, done, down to dry, they looked flat. Even.
back cover - glued with fixative - see wrinkling
In 6 hours they had permanent wrinkling.
I tried a finishing spray gloss to see if it might even the wrinkles out, but that didn’t work.
I tried making a few collages using a gluestick instead of Modge Podge. I figured it was drier, more controlled, and there wasn’t any real way for me to use too much glue, which contributes to wrinkling. It would give the minimum glue possible, probably.
gluestick animal-themed covers - glued with fixative
Still got wrinkles.
That means now I’ve got book covers I spent a lot of time on that I don’t think are good enough to use. It’s disheartening. That was a lot of time.
I’m a little frustrated, with books or maybe with decoupage. Or both. Do you know how hard it is to glue a tight, aligned fabric cover onto a book board?
It’s hard. (But I’ve figured it out, at least. Now I have a good system.) Decoupage, I haven’t yet. I didn’t glue any more for a long time and I even put off writing this post. It was the frustration. The dead end. The wrinkle problem.
For months, I didn’t do any more collages. But then…
I made this today. It’s the first element of a cover art design I’m making for a short story I’m going to hand-publish and all that jazz. My brother wrote it. I had told him, I had all these skills and supplies for book binding, I had to put them to use, and asked him to send me something I could publish for him. It’s called “An Informal Guide To: Getting Drunk on Valentine’s Day & Contacting Your Exes.” I think the collage I made is perfect.
For this one, I know i’ll be making color photocopies of this design - a lot - so I can mess with it and figure out how the rest of the cover should look. I think, honestly, printed copies will end up the final solution for this one. I need to mass produce them, or at least, “make 50 copies,” which maybe isn’t very “mass” but it’s certainly “recreate over and over.” I just don’t like the texture or durability of paper covers on the book boards. I’m going to still spray a finisher or put a gloss on the covers, which I hope will help a lot with that. I just feel it’s not as cool as painted, cloth, or actual collage covers…But hey. I’ll copy the images all high definition and the cover will still look really cool.
I’m kind of excited about making books again. :)
cover art - glued on paper with stick - paper, no fixative
I have a lot of photos about how to do the fabric covers right so they turn out well, and was going to post about that process in my Bookbinding 2 post, but it's fiddly and I suspect a little boring. So instead, here are just pictures of some of the new books I have finished since my original post.
gold painted wooden letters hot glued on blank covers
Blue = Fabric Cover, Green Flower = Painted/glossed Cover With Fabric Flower Glued On, Dots = Fabric, 2 aforementioned Halloween collages
left and right are fabric covers, center is painted/glossed metallic
all fabric - jean pockets and yellow flowers
So far, I have successfully given about 5-6 books away. LOL. And a maybe goal of getting a booth at an arts festival next fall, if I can get happy with quality. Probably not, maybe probably not worth it, also.
But hey, it's something to do.
References
rd95's initial decoupage post:
Fuckin' Bookbinding, Yo:
cc: elizabeth
Oh. My. THESE ARE AWESOME!!! Especially the pumpkin one. Especially the burgundy one with the gold flowers. Especially, especially, especially the jean pocket ones. I love them all. Out of curiosity, are you getting slightly better with the wrinkles? I've discovered that A) using slightly less glue and B) putting a piece down at the center or an edge and then smoothing it outward tends to help. Dala got me a rubber squeegee and a rubber roller to help, but I haven't done any decoupaging lately to practice with them. I'll do some soon and report back. Oh yeah. Go slow. Going slow seems to help. Dude. These are amazing. You totally should consider renting a booth at a small fair. Shoot, that'd be an awesome Hubski meet up actually. Everyone getting together to sell a bunch if random stuff. I think it'd be fun.
Wallll, shucks. Thanks. That's really nice to hear! The burgundy and gold flower pattern is among my favorites as well, also the swirly orange. I've repurposed several haven't-been-worn-in-nearly-recent-enough-times clothes for most of the fabric book covers. It's a cool way to re-use the material, especially if the shirts don't fit, or have holes, or belong to your ex-boyfriend, or I guess you can't wear 'em anymore but are sentimental enough you can't throw them away, neither. I have not have any improvement with the wrinkles because I got kind of frustrated and stopped. I do use a bone folder which is a tool for smoothing and folding - to smooth pieces when I am gluing them. It seemed to work but ripples began to appear as the collages dried, even if they seemed smooth when wet. I do wonder if the cardboard book boards I am using aren't helping. The wine-heart I just glued on paper and I am not noticing any significant wrinkling. I wonder if the cardboard makes it so the glue dries from outward in and maybe something about having wet glue under dry glue maybe leading to the top collage layer warping out slightly while the bottom layer is still wet and drying. Idk, sounds good, doesn't it? I get wrinkles even with a glue stick which I really think shouldn't be happening. But I do think the "going slow" - really, "going as slow as you can possibly go" - might help. You can always go slower, right? That's my current approach. I'm so flattered and glad you like them! My goal was to create sufficient varied quality product over the next year as there's an annual Arts festival near me every September. I want to do some things besides books, maybe stationary or envelopes or etc, something that would give my booth more variety. I also want to try paper making, even though I've previously decried paper making as one of the most pointless "crafts" of all time - as generally, to make paper, you tear up old paper, get it wet, and shape it into new paper sheets. If that isn't a lot of activity disguising total stasis I don't know what is, but I think hand made paper would be a selling point. And give my books another special quality/defining characteristic/whatever. Might as well go whole hog, basically, amirite?
So a few quick thoughts on paper, cause I'm on lunch. 1) If you're thinking about doing decoupaging with paper other than stuff from magazines, home made paper would add an extra level of awesome to it. 2) One of the nice things about home made paper as a hobby, is its actually really easy to get materials. Flyers in the mail and at the store? Free paper. Old receipts? Free paper. Junk mail without any identifying information? Free paper. You can find free paper to work with almost anywhere. 3) I've seen people do really cool things making paper, including but not limited to adding fragrances, adding plant matter for texture, varying their mixes to get certain textures, on and on. As far as your wrinkles are concerned, you might want to experiment on how to get deliberate wrinkles. Depending on what you make down the road and how you want it to turn out, wrinkles might add a desirable effect. Yes. I'm a nerd for shit like this. No, I'm not turning in my man card. Edit: Cause I can't say it enough, your shit rocks.
Yeah, so one thought I had had was to press flowers and plants and try to incorporate them into covers for decoration or into homemade paper. However a friend pointed out there might be some problems with decomposition, maybe (I can see the potential at least) and I'm not totally set on how to prevent that. I think I would need a heavier finishing gloss, but that might benefit me as it is too. I was going to mention. Glue. I have so much and so many kinds of glue. Modge podge, white elmers/school glue, glue sticks, hot glue gun, basically any basic fixative option. I've been considering trying out a spray adhesive as well. There is so much glue in the world! And it is all really different and it matters! I've also experienced with a book where i covered it with essentially a mat of ribbons I had wove into fabric. It looked really cool and had awesome texture but the hassle was not worth it. Not pictured cuz I gave it to a friend. In that vein I've pondered knitting covers (probably too bulky and time consuming but cool texture) or maybe trying to incorporate cross stitch or embroidery into covers. I'm mostly coming down on the side of "going to take way too long to pay off" on these, but who knows if I still have thread and needles I can brush off at my parents' house just to experiment? I am always trying to think of new ways to do book covers. I think there's probably a lot you can do that would be really fun.
That ribbon book sounds amazing. :) It's amazing how much the type glue actually does make a difference, both in how easy or difficult it is to use in a certain scenario as well as the final result you get from it. Factor in that different types of papers have different textures, thicknesses, etc., there really is a lot to experiment with. Out of curiosity, have you tried the spray adhesive? What kind of luck have you had with it? I've been tempted to try it myself, but I think it would be too messy and unwieldy for how I work. That said, I did decide to switch to spray varnish to finish my pieces because regular varnish keeps on fucking up my brushes and it was getting wasteful. Remind me to share the results of that. Sorry. Tangent here. That's the hard thing about making things to sell, isn't it? You need a product at a price that someone is willing to buy, but at the same time you can make enough money off of to make it worth your while. No one wants to do the math to find out they're making less than minimum wage on each piece they sell. There was a really good thread on Reddit a while back about people getting worried that Etsy is starting to ruin the market value of hand made products because A) people are willing to sell stuff for less to just move product and B) people are selling handmade goods from Asia for super cheap (I kid you not) bringing the price of stuff down. It's a pickle of a situation for sure. If your amaze balls quilt could have easily sold for $3,000 ten years ago but now people think they should only have to pay $500 for the same quilt today, you're probably justified in feeling a bit frustrated. With that in mjnd, how's your Etsy shop doing? Have you tried to figure out ways to make more books faster, cheaper, etc? I'm genuinely curious. :)I'm mostly coming down on the side of "going to take way too long to pay off."
In the 3 or 6 or whatever months I had an Etsy shop (featuring the books), I raked in a grand total of one "like" from a random user. That's it. When the listings expired I let them expire. I think it's actually probably harder to sell things like handmade books on Etsy, where there's a plethora, that it would be at local crafts fairs and similar artisan, in-person events. I bolded in person because I suspect seeing products for real, and being near them for real and then walking away from them for real, not to mention being able to pick them up, leaf through them, in general touch and experience the products, is going to give the average vendor more sales than having an online shop will. I think you make a connection at a fair with the vendors that are there and those products - instead of on Etsy where there are literally dozens of pages of hand made books. I definitely noted that "hand made books" on sale on Etsy....aren't always really verifiably hand made, at least not by whoever was posting them for sale, and are often super cheap. I kind of wonder if some unscrupulous people buy bulk batches of handmade books from India and China and mark them up on places like Etsy, basically using people's perception that Etsy is full of real handmade people and goods in order to add a certain aura to their products and sell them at a steep profit. Can't prove any of that though. I've gotten better at making books in volume just with practice, and also I realized that you make a lot more books more quickly if you mass-produce whatever you need at each step. For instance, when I'm folding paper for pages, I just fold until I'm out of paper - not until I hit some # I need for a specific project. Because damn, if folded and pressed signatures aren't my major limiting agent in book production, or what. (They are - it's because it's the most boring of the steps, probably. But I get by with folding them while TV-watching.) My cloth covers are all recycled clothes and my collages are all free magazines. I have managed to source a quality book board cardboard on Amazon for real cheap, and oh - i steal all the actual paper in my books - so besides the initial struggles of getting the really right materials, honestly, book binding has been pretty cheap for me. Of course, that's if you're not trying to calculate for time and a profit in there, either. I figure, I can worry how many hours each book takes and what I should be paid and all of that - the invisible expenses of making product - later. Like, waaaay later. Like let me sell a god damn book to a person later. And then maybe 5 or 10 more, before I even start worrying about it. I just charged a rough figure for the Etsy listings, but honestly there was no way I could compete with $5 handmade books at a loser price without bleeding money. I haven't actually used spray adhesive yet, it's on my wish list, but I've seen a few blogs that seem to like it a lot - in the right application, of course.
I think in general, you'll have better luck selling in person. People can get a better feel for the craftsmanship involved and there's also a psychological element that factors in as well. When the person who made the item is standing in front of you, you feel more compelled to buy to avoid hurting their feelings. That's why little one and two dollar knick knacks are good to have on your table. They people an easy way to buy something to settle that emotion without breaking the bank. Also, you should start making paper. It'll add n additional element to your books. :)
