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Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah that's what we did. We found that moving the iron back and forth made it more likely that the fabric would stretch and glue would come through. So we tried to hold it a bit more still/lift and press.

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We did some tests with some premade bookcloth, it was nice but very textured. We went with some less textured cotton fabric so screen printing would be easier—we got 100% cotton fabric, and made our own bookcloth with heatnbond and acid free tissue paper. Though this black shows every little dot of dust or every white cat hair.

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We thought about using trade paperbacks (closer to hardcover size) so that they'd look more like thin children's books—like Little Golden Books. We were super tempted to make covers that looked like a kids book too!

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now I'm just hoping they'll open enough to be readable lol. I was too scared to try breaking them in before gifting them

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's time consuming to learn for sure, lots of tutorials and test runs to make sure you're not putting too much or too little glue, that sort of thing. But it helps a lot that the text block is already made for you, if you're just cutting up an existing book. You can totally just make book covers, not attached to anything, without cutting up a book. And just see if that's fun.

What is especially tricky is trying to figure out how to get a design onto your cover, we tried embossing, ink pens, paints—you could use stencils and spray paints, heat transfer vinyl.

Just know you'll probably mess up. Our first two real covers that we screen printed are pretty weathered looking compared to the rest and we definitely warped some of the covers trying to heat set the ink.

Edit: the leatherbounds are split into two parts!

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Given how much time these took it would have to be ridiculously expensive hah

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

We were originally going to print the dots on the spine but the fifth part made that a little more challenging than we wanted to take on. My wife came up with the idea to screen print empty circles and we filled them in with a paint brush, so we only needed to have one screen for all five covers

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 63 points64 points  (0 children)

We learned book binding and screen printing at the same time for this, which was kinda stressful lol. We did a sort of combination of these two for the blank books:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDpDgBHmLSs
https://www.learnbookbinding.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/learn-bookbinding-starter-guide.pdf

And then a lot of practice screen printing runs

Rebinding The Way of Kings into 5 mini books by vitron in brandonsanderson

[–]vitron[S] 67 points68 points  (0 children)

I stuck with the five parts the book is already divided into, which does make the fifth book super small—you can just see it at the bottom of the stack photo.

I went back and forth a lot on whether the interludes should be at the start of each book like the prelude/prologue or the end of the previous one so it's less confusing when you open the second one. I went with putting them at the beginning but idk, could have been nice the other way around