Saturday, July 30, 2005

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Both Covers
Both Covers,
originally uploaded by corwinok.
I finally finished my edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The stitching on the millipedes isn't quite as clean as I'd like, especially across the spine, but it seems to work, and isn't too bad for a first effort. The sueded paper is just a joy to work with and looks absolutely beautiful (plus it feels nice). The only part that really didn't go quite right, oddly enough, was the endpapers. I got a fair amount more warping and bubbling than I usually do, which probably either came from using too much glue, or a wetter glue than usual. I don't have pictures of them up, but I used a silver-finish light-weight cardstock for the endpapers, which goes well with the cover paper.

For the text on the cover, I printed out the image I used on the title page, then used that as a template to hand-emboss the letters into the cover. I bought an embossing tool a little while back, but hadn't had a chance to use it. It did great, and I inked the embossed letters afterwards. It should work just as well on the spine of a regular binding as well.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Dorian Gray continues

I picked up some more embroidery floss today, so I sat down to work on the sewing portion of my edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. To make things easier, I went ahead and punched the two double rows of holes across the top and bottom of each cover where I intend to run caterpillar stitching (actually, half-hitch millipedes ala evilrooster). Then I unspooled about half a skein of silver-grey floss and got to work. It went much better than I'd expected. Normally when working with that long a thread for sewing, I spend most of my time fighting the tangles that form nearly continuously. I'm also terrible at estimating how much thread I'll need, so imagine my surprise when I got finished and discovered that I had cut exactly the length I needed. When doing a coptic stitch binding, there's a fine line that needs to be walked on how tight to stitch it. Too loose, and the signatures shift around and the book just flops open. Too tight and the develops an annoying concavity. I've managed over time to develop a pretty good feel for how much tension to maintain as I go, so things turned out pretty well. The only real looseness is at the back cover, which is, in my opinion, the hardest part to stitch on. But that will be tightened up fine by the millipedes and glueing the first and last pages of the text block to the insides of the covers.

Now the pictures:

Prepped for Sewing Stitching Successful Front cover Both covers

Monday, July 25, 2005

I give you the First Church of Galactus

The Beginning of Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray Covers

The other night, I started the real hands-on work for binding my edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here are the results, the front and back covers. I used the tabbed corners from evilrooster's instructions, and they turned out pretty well. The covers aren't connected and there's no spine because I'll be doing a coptic stitch binding of the book, which will allow it to be opened flat all the way to the spine. This will take care of the problems I had with the printing offsets.

Dorian Gray printed


Here's the big pile of folding I had before me. The first three or so signatures are done, but there's a monster pile underneath to form the rest.

Dorian Gray signatures


And now the folding is done. I think it came to 14 or 15 signatures, but I'm too lazy to go back and count. The next step is going to be sitting down and punching all of the holes in both the signatures and the covers for stitching. I'm thinking of trying some new (to me anyay) embellishments I've read about, so I need to think on it a bit before I start punching.

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Tuesday, July 12, 2005

X-Men Meme

You scored as Wolverine. Wolverine is a loner, and a skilled fighter. He's got the hots for Jean Grey but a better fit for him would be Storm. He doesn't like to follow orders which pisses Cyclops off. He has terrible memories from the experimentation done on him at Weapon X. Even though he doesn't show it, he loves the X-Men. Powers: Fast healing and adamantium skeleton and claws.

Wolverine


85%

Nightcrawler


65%

Storm


65%

Rogue


60%

Beast


60%

Gambit


60%

Colossus


60%

Emma Frost


55%

Iceman


55%

Jean Grey


45%

Cyclops


40%

Most Comprehensive X-Men Personality Quiz
created with QuizFarm.com

Monday, July 11, 2005

The horror, the horror



I just subjected myself to what was, hands down, the worst dinosaur movie I've ever seen. That, my friends, is saying something. I love dinosaurs. I never grew out of that phase, so any movie featuring dinosaurs automatically catches my eye. And I really don't set the bar terribly high for my dinosaur movies; I enjoy damn near everything I can find with my favorite prehistoric creatures in it. Bonus points if there's a triceratops.

got no bonus points. Raptor, actually, got no points at all.

I knew I wasn't getting a Jurassic Park when I picked out a movie produced by Roger Corman, starring Eric "Acting? What's that?" Roberts and Corbin "I have a distinguished film career" Bernsen. What I'd forgotten is that Corman, legendary cheapskate that he is, never spends a dime he doesn't have to. The opening scene features a trio of teens racing around the back country in a jeep. The stop, and the one with a beer in his hand hops out to take a leak while the other couple start to make out. Recipe for disaster, of course, as they are attacked and torn apart by a mid-sized rubber dinosaur puppet.

Anyone who's seen Roger Corman's epic dinosaur flick Carnosaur* probably recognizes this scene (unless they've blotted that movie from their minds). Corman didn't just recycle the idea, or the script, he spliced the footage from Carnosaur in as the opening sequence. So, about 60 seconds into the movie, I knew I'd made a horrible mistake. For the first time in my life, I found myself watching a dinosaur movie with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Due to a combination of morbid fascination, laziness, and an inability to stop a movie once I've put it on, I found myself unable to stop watching. And what I discovered was easily 1/3 of the movie was recycled footage from Carnosaur. In a couple of these scenes, they didn't even bother trying to match the actor's appearance from seconds before (when there were no dinosaurs around).

To call the cast actors would be generous. I could outact Roberts if I were in a persistent vegetative state. And Bernsen seemed to be wandering through the set half-heartedly looking for puppies to kick to establish the evilness of his character. The only characters that even made me smile the tiniest bit were the military guys sent in to clean up the mess. They seemed to think that saying "f*ck" a lot was the best way to indiciate they're military. I mean, I swear a lot, possibly too much, when I'm in a relaxed atmosphere, and I'm sure soldiers in tense situations do so to some extent, but even I thought it was gratuitious. And that's saying something.

One thing I definitely learned from this movie is that dinosaurs didn't actually walk, except for the big t-rex-ish one. Instead, they glided about roughly an inch above the ground without bothering to move their legs or even pretend to have any normal means of locomotion. While this did mean the vastly overused impact tremor effect shown in a puddle or glass of water was conspicuous in its absence, that's certainly not worth giving up any of one's evening to see.

In short, even if you enjoy bad movies the way I do, you should run screaming if you ever encounter Raptor. To help with this, I included the image from IMDB of the movie's cover so you'll be on alert. Seriously, don't watch this. I'm traumatized, and that's hard to do.



* I actually liked Carnosaur. It was a fun watch, and had an interesting premise. Instead of a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong, it was a genetic experiment gone horribly right.

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