Calmer currents

This cooler week was such a blessing. I really think that heatwave almost did me in. Here are the last few sets of tip-ins for my book. Thank goodness a friend told me NOT to do this for every single spread. Each is a different dye or pigment.

I took the previous dummies and used those prints as my templates to cut out each bit. This one I had to do a lot because I only did 9 in my first session and had to do the 10th the next day.

This is the hardest one but once they're done it's very satisfying. Thank goodness for tweezers.

This is the smallest one and good in both directions. An easy start if I work from the back of the book, or a welcome finish if I work from the front.

The covers took a while to construct, all from persimmon-coated hanji. You can see some is much darker than others, some much crunchier than others. It's funny how you make these things not knowing why and years later they let you know what they would like to be.

Those are the four spreads with the tip-ins. I was surprised by how patient I was with this part of the process, gluing and drying under weights. I usually never want to wait and then things come out cockled.

I started sewing with silk thread but it wasn't quite right. Then I went back to the linen thread I did on the first dummy. Still not what I was looking for. Then I finally got the right touch with the pineapple paper thread that I spun years ago. Was it six years ago? It was just the right weight. There's one drum leaf on the bottom, a different structure, my liberty with a variable edition.

Paper thread is too precious to throw away so these will wait for the next project. There are a couple gold threads and a needle in there as well since I used gold for all the covers. That was a challenge, even with pre-pierced holes, because the gold paper wrapped thread kept coming apart as it traveled through the crunchy persimmon covers.

And of course, more offcuts from cover construction! I didn't think I'd finish this edition before I left but I knew I wouldn't want to have to do it when I return so Present Self is giving Future Self a big gift. Now I can try to get this other edition done, which is big, as I usually don't try to do this many in a year. Fingers crossed I can do it during my final weekend before endless driving east.