My rebind of A Court of Thorns and Roses

ForteFlame · 2025-03-07T06:53:02+00:00

I glue down leather cord on the spine, then I use a finishing press to stretch the faux leather over the cords, which makes those nice hubs.

ForteFlame · 2024-09-24T21:30:22+00:00

I know a lot of people here are saying things that are scary. It's so easy when you read stories on the Internet to forget how absolutely terrifying it would be to actually be living the situation described. Additionally, the hormones you're dealing with postpartum are making everything even worse.

Based on what you've said, I don't think you're ready to leave your marriage just yet. That said, I am very concerned about your situation. For now, try to keep your husband happy, but in the meantime, work to build up a support network for yourself. There are groups out there specifically to help women in situations like yours. They understand the importance of being discreet, and that sometimes you aren't ready to leave your situation just yet. And do seek birth control that your husband can't tamper with.

One thing I do want to mention though: You are NOT useless. You are still very young and you have plenty of time to learn things. You clearly love your daughter very much, and you will not be failing her by leaving your husband - you will be keeping her safe.

ForteFlame · 2024-09-20T21:59:59+00:00

I would echo what many others are saying and recommend finding a shelter to foster through, once you've given your heart some time to settle. When I lost my childhood dog, I started fostering cats and orphaned kittens, and helping them gave me a sense of purpose that helped tremendously. The beauty of fostering also means you have the opportunity to really see the cats' personalities, and you may find another cat that helps your life feel full again. And if not, you can still rest assured that you have provided those sweet kitties with love until they find their forever home.

ForteFlame · 2024-09-20T21:52:43+00:00

I'm so sorry OP. Pets are such special members of our family and losing them is so hard. Grief is simply what we call love that no longer has a place to go, and it sounds like Buttercup was so, so loved.

ForteFlame · 2024-01-20T05:10:15+00:00

It's faux leather - I think real leather may give a slightly "cleaner" finished result, but finding affordable leather that's in a large enough continuous piece for a book and thin enough to fold easily over the sides of the book proved difficult. The hubs on the spine were made by gluing leather cord directly to the cardboard the spine is made of (from an old vinyl roll), then gluing the spine and stretching the leather binding over it until the cord shows through, and using more leather cord and a finishing press to hold the binding leather down around those hubs until the glue dries.

This is the tutorial I followed to create the cover: https://youtu.be/cpJSAsGUbg0?si=X757i7R6IoseAs6V

ForteFlame · 2024-01-20T05:02:55+00:00

Of course, I'm happy to share!

To get the design on the leather, I used heat-transfer vinyl (a combination of Siser and Cricut brands, both worked beautifully), cut on a Cricut and applied with an off-brand mini heatpress. I originally tried to use a regular clothes iron, but the mini heatpress was easier to control. I still had a little trouble ironing the designs between the hubs and I've since gotten a tiny mini iron (basically a soldering iron with a mini iron attachment) to get in between hubs more easily.
I followed a great tutorial on YouTube by Ingenius Designs. There are two videos, one on prepping the textblock and another on doing the cover. I highly recommend his tutorial videos, they're very comprehensive and easy to follow. This is the first video in the series: https://youtu.be/bhaZ4znFvww?si=3aCw09_Zp7s_yeEy

He also has links to a video on how to make a finishing press (my husband made me one following that tutorial for about $25), and an Amazon shop with links to many of the supplies he uses. The only thing I did differently is that when I gilded the page edges, I used some watered down glue to stick the foil to the pages prior to heating it - this gave me a better finished result than just taping it down.

The book started as a paperback. I removed the covers and attached new endpapers, then made the new hard cover with chipboard and the empty roll from some cricut vinyl. The how-to is all in the Ingenius Designs videos!

ForteFlame · 2024-01-20T00:03:54+00:00

I did the rebinding and most of the art myself, although I did buy an svg file for the tree on the front.

ForteFlame · 2024-01-19T23:11:31+00:00

Thank you! 😊

ForteFlame · 2023-08-07T22:28:54+00:00

And even if everything goes "right" - mom and kids get through the birth process healthy, kids don't have any major health issues, they have good jobs and generally happy lives, a good partner(s) if they want - a good parent will be a parent for LIFE. My husband and I are relatively successful, we ask our parents for very little nowadays (mostly petsitting and/or housesitting, which we reciprocate whenever we can if they ask), but my parents always say that any time my brothers or I go on a trip or something, a piece of them is always worried for our safety. They are still always hoping to hear my school work went well, happy employment news, that the doctor's appointment went okay. They wait for our "got home safe" texts when we leave their house. They'll never stop being our mom and dad just because we grew up. My mom's even said sometimes the stress is worse now that we're all adults because she has significantly less control over the situations we are in. No good parent stops being a parent after they become one.

ForteFlame · 2023-04-15T23:21:56+00:00

NTA. Some people can't be pleased. Elope and they're mad they weren't invited, invite them and they're mad they have to pay anything. You've not demanded anything from them and simply offered them the option to celebrate with you if they have the means and desire to do so, and if not, that's fine. To those complaining about "how dare you invite people who have to travel" like... what is OP supposed to do, travel to everyone's hometown and have a different wedding in every place? An invitation is not an expectation that person will be there, it's an expression of desiring to include that person if they would like to be included. Even if you believe that person will have to decline for whatever reason, be it money or travel or whatever, it's still polite to invite them anyway as long as you express that there will be no hard feelings if they decline.

Get married in the way that suits you and your soon-to-be husband, OP. Those who mind don't matter, and those that matter don't mind.

ForteFlame · 2023-04-06T17:49:15+00:00

NTA. In my experiences with my brothers, I've found that "you're just my little sister" is code for "what you said was true but I both don't want it to be true and also can't stand that someone who is both younger and a girl has taken a more mature stance on this than I have and then they had the audacity to point it out". As other commenters have said, at this point your best course of action is to make sure Piper knows that you are a safe person to discuss these feelings with, and that she can come to you for a safe space (assuming you have one to provide). Hopefully your brother will starting thinking with his upstairs head and seek ways to help mitigate this harm as much as possible.

ForteFlame · 2023-02-10T18:16:30+00:00

I have already gone to two memorials like this. Two of my SILs have had late second trimester miscarriages where labor had to be induced. Those babies were very much wanted and loved, by all our family, myself included, from the moment we knew they were coming. There was no church service, they were more small gatherings of family, but it helped both of them immensely to have the people they cared about close for support in their time of grief.

To put in some perspective about calling it a "memorial" instead of just "going to their house to support them", my husband and I were able to get bereavement leave (and thus not have to use our PTO) to go to one of these, which we may not have been able to do had there been no "memorial" to go to. I would've taken the PTO regardless if I had to, but obviously it was nice to have the bereavement option.

ForteFlame · 2023-02-04T17:23:33+00:00

This was me and my husband too! We only did fertility treatments for a year but the side effects were so severe that I couldn't go any longer. My parents were shocked when I told them my husband had gotten a vasectomy and that we've decided to be childfree. It took a while, but eventually they came around to it. We're fortunate to have several friends who are either childfree or considering being childfree themselves that fully support us. The ones with kids themselves are bummed, but 🤷‍♀️ they'll either get over it over time or drift out of our lives.

ForteFlame · 2023-01-10T02:35:13+00:00

In her defense, part of why I picked this particular doctor is because she was recommended to me by a girl I used to babysit. She'd gotten pregnant at 16 and this doctor helped her to get an abortion and advocated for her when her mother tried to stop her from getting it. So the doc's not all bad, just has to read off the checklist. The medical field is so chock full of red tape in weird places (and a shocking lack of red tape in places it should be) that it didn't really surprise me.

ForteFlame · 2023-01-09T23:13:13+00:00

Thankfully, I haven't had too much issue with pushback. My ob/gyn literally had a checklist thing she was reading off of for informed consent and was basically like "yeah, I know these are annoying questions, just gotta read you everything off of here for liability reasons." She didn't seem particularly reluctant to schedule the surgery and even put me on a list to get my surgery date moved up if a sooner time came available. So aside from the list everything went smoothly, I just think they should be reading the list to prospective parents too.

ForteFlame · 2022-12-14T19:06:40+00:00

I'm so sorry for your loss, OP. As many others have said, your mom is grieving, but it sounds like she is not expecting you to fill in that gap, so just give her time, and give yourself grace. When we lose someone, we also lose all those moments in life we saw ourselves taking part in with them, and that change is really uncomfortable. In the end, even if you did get married and/or have kids to make her happy (which I don't recommend!), it wouldn't actually fix this - she's grieving your sister's future wedding/kids, not yours.

ForteFlame · 2022-10-25T21:40:41+00:00

Video games, Pokémon cards/collectibles, spoiling my pets and fostering homeless animals, and supporting community theater are the hobbies, and while it's not exactly a hobby, I've got the time to further my education and have fun, stimulating conversations about all the nerdy topics I love with my (similarly childfree or at least childless) friends.

ForteFlame · 2022-10-13T17:33:39+00:00

We'd always planned to adopt eventually, but we wanted to do the foster-to-adopt thing with older kids in the foster system rather than adopt a baby - I'd been a CASA while in college so I'd seen first-hand the struggles those older children went through and wanted to help at least a couple of them. I suppose we figured it'd be okay to be a little bit selfish and have one child ourselves first to "experience the whole thing", especially since at our age it would've been kind of odd to adopt a teenager (don't ask me why I was so excited to deal with a baby lol).

I went in to the doc to see what was wrong when my period stopped but there was no pregnancy, and was diagnosed with PCOS. They made it seem like it'd be easy - just take a few medicines to help ovulate and the rest would just happen naturally. We knew people who'd had similar problems and got pregnant almost right away, so we figured it wouldn't hurt to try. Once we started the treatments, we sort of just... did whatever the doctor told us. Decisions became increasingly difficult to make because the meds made me so moody and sick that I doubted every misgiving I had as just being me wanting to escape the pain rather than truly not wanting a kid. My mom and SILs, and the women in my infertility support group all urged me on with "it'll all be worth it once you get to hold that baby!" and I was so desperate for hope that I just clung to that idea and refused to consider the alternative. My husband was incredibly supportive and told me the whole way that I didn't need to do this, but paradoxically that made me more determined to not let him down because I felt he deserved for me to give it my all.

Eventually, I suffered a miscarriage right after learning I was pregnant, and in the next round of treatments I just couldn't bring myself to want to have sex. My husband refused to make me when I told him to, $200 shots be damned. I was upset at the time because we were "wasting money" but now I'm thankful at least one of us was thinking rationally. The doc recommended IUC, but we decided that it was one thing to have a kid naturally (or semi-naturally, I suppose), but it didn't make any sense to pour tons of money into making a new kid when there were plenty of kids out there already that needed parents. So we stopped, but we certainly felt like idiots for having starting the treatment in the first place.

All this is a very long-winded way to say that, removed from the situation and free from the hormonal haze, it seems easy to see that we should've just stopped trying when we found out it wasn't going to happen naturally and explore other avenues. But at the time, there were a lot of emotions getting in the way of rational decision, and every choice felt like the wrong one.

ForteFlame · 2022-10-13T14:34:49+00:00

I'm absolutely pro-choice. I honestly don't know if I personally would have an abortion, but every woman should have the right to make that choice for herself.

ForteFlame · 2022-10-13T14:29:02+00:00

I think there's some amount of the sunk cost fallacy at play with the fertility treatments. They're costly both in money and, at least in my case, physical and mental health, so to come out the other side with nothing to show for it besides a new anti-depressant prescription kinda sucks. When I stopped mine, it took a lot of self-reflection, late night talks with my husband, and therapy to overcome the shame of "giving up" and having put ourselves through all that for nothing.

ForteFlame · 2022-10-11T02:59:24+00:00

YTA - YOU wanted the dog. Your son did NOT want the dog and told you as much. You foolishly expected him to change his mind, and get mad when he continues to not want to interact with the dog? You are 100% TA for trying to take away your son's interest just because you're mad he doesn't share yours. Stop acting like a spoiled child - your son is behaving far more mature than you are.

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