I make so many mistakes. That’s my conclusion when it comes to me learning book binding. I’m much better at art than I am at craft. That’s something I’ve known but this book binding is making me confront it again. It’s amazing the things that a person can have patience for compared to the things a person has no patience for.
What’s the difference between art and craft you ask? Art is about creation and craft is about recreation. Of course there is art in craft and craft in art but in art you usually have to make something only once. In craft you have to make things over and over.
For example I once saw a show that was all about restoring a staircase. Along the banister of the staircase was a series of carved wooden heads. There must have been thirty of them. That was craft. The craftsman had to figure out how he was going to carve, not just one head, but thirty of them. On at a time and under budget. They all have to be the same size, the same quality, and look like a set.
Compare that to an artist making one sculpture of a head. He decides on size, material, and technique all on its own. He only has to do it once and not repeat it ever. That opens up a lot of time consuming techniques that can’t be used on a set of twenty.
The steps for doing one sculpture can be anything. The steps for doing twenty sculptures all have to be the same. This is a huge difference. If I’m doing book binding and it takes ten steps to make a book then I have to do those ten steps the exact same every time. That’s craft.
The problem is that if a step takes twenty minutes sometimes my brain says, “I bet if I move quickly I can get it done in fifteen.” Then, because I’m moving quickly I make a mistake and have to start over. Suddenly my twenty minute step is half an hour. I can’t seem to help myself.
With art there are steps but often I rearrange them to try to get something new. Sometimes I mess up but usually I don’t. And if I mess up I might find something new in the mistake. With craft mistakes usually just ruin whatever I’m doing.
Since I’m new to book binding I’m also always finding new ways to do something but that means a whole new set of steps to follow that are unlike the old sets of steps. I really have to write the steps down because they are beginning to blur together in my mind.
The step I’ve messed up the most is putting clear contact paper down on a cover. I print out a piece of art to use for the cover and then protect it with the contact paper. The contact paper has to be put on very precisely. The cover is 11×17 inches and it’s easy to mess up.
First of all the contact paper comes on a roll. It’s good to flatten it out a bit first with a book. But this takes time. There is wax paper that covers up the sticky side of the contact paper and I have to peel up a small corner of the waxed paper and stick it to the cover. Very slowly and carefully I have to pull back the wax paper and burnish the sticky side down to the art.
At least four times in fifteen books I’ve messed up that process. I get impatient and don’t wait for the contact paper to unroll or I just move too fast. It’s the part of the process I’ve grown to dislike the most. I’ve been coming up with other ways to make strong covers.
How I was messing up today was with printing the covers. I’ve been working on a “Golden Ratio” sketchbook and that’s the cover I’ve been doing. I thought I had it done but when I was looking at it after I printed it out there were extra graph paper boxes outside the Golden Ratio. This made it not the Golden ratio. I had to remove them.
My cover printouts have two sides to them. The side with the art and the other side with the guidelines of when to fold and glue the cover. Pretty simple. Print one side then the other. All of the parts are in layers in Photoshop. When printing the front side I accidentally left the guide lined layer on. So they printed on the art. Whoops. Two pieces of good printing paper wasted.
That’s been just today too. I have a pile of hard cases for the books I’ve been making that haven’t come out correctly. At least three of them have been because I didn’t measure correctly. You know that old saying to measure twice and cut once? Well I didn’t. Probably because I was impatient.
I’ve been having some other problems that weren’t my fault. One of the steps in book binding is to glue the cardboard that makes a hardcover hard onto the paper or fabric of the book cover. For some reason this week that has not been going well and the glue has been staining both the paper and the raw canvas that I’ve been using. You can see the outline of the glue as it discolors the cover. It wasn’t doing that before so I’m not sure why it’s doing that now. But I can’t have it. It looks terrible.
I have all the patience in the world for making art. I can work on a painting, drawing, or photograph for endless hours until I get it done. But craft I’m a lot more impatient with. Following the right steps over and over can wear out my patience. I have no idea why either. I do know that I have to write some steps down.