So....

Okay, here's the deal. I was all ready to finish my book today and I got it printed out and everything and then....one page ended up being flipped around. Not a huge problem except that by the time I noticed it I couldn't go back to get it reprinted. Funny thing is, I checked all the pages to make sure they were right and I thought that one page was fine, too, but when I actually started assembling the signatures I realized there was a blank page next to the text instead of the proper illustration.

The culprit. The queen should be on the right and the blank page should be on the left. Sigh.

 Ironically, the illustration mirrored my reaction to the situation (at least I could find some humour in it). Anyway, I suppose it turned out for the best since I would have been rushing to finish the book anyway as I still had to do the covers (and hand paint the title text). This way I won't have to rush it. Seriously, though, check pages Very Carefully in the future.

In other news, I thought I'd take the opportunity to upload some of my process work up until this point so here are some images of my mock-up book binding and the little mock-ups I did for the signatures.

And here are the signatures I printed that were correct. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

And here are some of the materials including the leather and the end paper.

Here's how the end paper would look beside the title page.

I decided on having the end paper just glued to the back of the cover board since trying to do a spread of end paper (by gluing it to the first signature to anchor it) would be a logistical nightmare (trust me, I tried to figure out how to sew through it - didn't work). Maybe there's a way to do it but I actually kind of prefer the dynamic created by the side-by-side look (not to mention the back of this Japanese paper has some shadowing happening that wouldn't look good with the title page beside it).

 So, anyway, that's my blog for today. Will try to finish this book up in the next couple of days (after I reprint the offending page). I'll post again at that time.