Memento Mori

 So, 2020 happened. That was a thing. As I'm sure it was for all of us, it was a particularly hard year for me. At the end of March, just before COVID-19 took over all of our lives, my mother passed away unexpectedly. There is some confusion about how exactly she passed, and I'm not convinced that COVID did not play a part, but testing was not being done at that time. She went into the hospital to get treated for rhabdomyolysis. She had been complaining of muscle pain and weakness in her legs for weeks and my daughter, who is a pharmacy student, discovered that she was taking two different statins (something you should never do). Mom went to the ER and it was confirmed that she had statin induced rhabdo. She spent several weeks in the hospital being treated, and was on the mend. I visited with her every day back then, and we could see the COVID hysteria ramping up around us. At that time, there was only one confirmed COVID patient in our city (and not in our hospital). After her treatment concluded, she was transferred to an off-site facility to complete her recovery and to begin physical therapy. The critical part should have been over at that point. When she was moved to the physical rehabilitation facility, COVID had become the hot topic of every day. The shut-down was beginning in our area. I was not allowed to visit her while she was in the new facility. She wasn't allowed to have visitors at all. She would remain there for several weeks, and we would communicate by phone or text. I would never see her alive again. 

Things seemed to be improving. She could get to the bathroom by herself now. Then, she called me one night out of the blue saying that she thought she was dying. Something was wrong. Her blood oxygen level was very low. She made some very bizarre remarks that made it seem like she might be having a psychotic episode. The doctors at the facility did not seem alarmed, and did not provide much information about her condition, nor did they seem to take the situation very seriously. The next morning they did decide to send her back to the ER. She barely made it through the doors of the Emergency Room before she coded. They could not resuscitate her. 

She was not allowed to have calling hours because of COVID. We have a large close knit family, and I had to chose a maximum of ten people to be at her graveside for the funeral.

My mother's passing is the primary reason that I have done almost nothing in the past year. I have been completely overwhelmed with her death, funeral, and estate. It is almost a year later, and I haven't really begun to grieve. 

But wait, there's more...

Due to COVID lock-down, my store was closed through most of the Winter and Spring. We did finally re-open again in June (three months later than we would have). My store clerk, Toni, has health problems of her own. She is the same age as my mom, and can barely walk from her car to the front door without resting. Her doctor didn't want her working at all in June, but she was eager to get back to work for financial reasons. So we started out only opening on weekends, and putting reasonably strict COVID prevention measures in place. No more than 4 people in the shop at a time, no children, masks required, frequent surface and hand sanitization. Despite the very late start, and the economy being in the tank, we actually had a pretty good year, financially. 

Then, in very early December, Toni got sick. Now, it's common for her to get bronchitis once or twice (or thrice) a year, especially when the weather turns cold, so we all hoped for the best, but there was always that fear looming over my shoulder that it could be something much worse. She spent a couple of weeks at home, but her condition did not improve. I told her she should go to the hospital, and that I wasn't going to let her come back to work without a negative COVID test. She dickered around for a few days, and then she finally went in to get tested. She was positive for COVID.

I held out hope, but all of her friends suspected that it was going to end badly. Toni stayed in the hospital for a couple of weeks. I took care of her cats while she was away. Then I got the DM from Toni's daughter that she had been called by the doctors to come up to the hospital (she lives in another state). Toni died just minutes before her daughter arrived in the room. It was the day after Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the longest year of my life.

Toni was like a second mother to me. I had known her since I was six years old. She ran my shop for me for the past ten or so years. Her daughter and I grew up together. To say that I feel more alone now than I have ever felt in my life is an understatement.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. Unlike my mother, who would have absolutely hated the fact that she couldn't have her family at her funeral, Toni was a very private person who didn't want anyone to know she was sick. She didn't want a funeral, or an obituary, or a memorial service. Her daughter had her remains cremated and plans to bury the ashes in secret in a place her mother would have liked. The only remembrance she will get is the small memorial table I have set up for her at the shop, for which I created this memorial book that friends and patrons can use to leave her a final farewell. It is one of the only things I have made in the past year.

The book itself was just a fake moleskin covered blank journal I found at a discount store. The images are ones she would have liked, gleaned from the internet. I etched the covers with my laser cutter. 

Memento Mori is a Latin phrase that means- "Remenber, that someday you too will die." Since my mother's passing almost a year ago, I have thought about little else.

Painted Pentagram Sketchbook

I recently visited a local craft store and found some nice 8x10 (ish) sketchbooks with cloth covered boards. They were surprisingly cheap, so I grabbed a couple for a future project. I have stacks and stacks of sketchbooks sitting around waiting to be made into custom books, but, I liked the cloth covers on these ones and, again, they were really cheap.

So, the other day, I was working at the store (my clerk was out for medical reasons), and I got bored. In my boredom, I had an idea for a quick paint job that I thought would look really nice on those new sketchbooks. This is essentially the same paint job that I have done on my kraft paper covered journals in the past, with a few minor differences.

I started by cutting out a paper stencil of the pentagram. I have a huge stack of pentagrams that I photo copied about fifteen years ago, and I have been pulling from that pile ever since. I cut it out with an x-acto knife and used mounting spray (a weak spray adhesive) on one side to fix it to the sketchbook cover. I originally intended to center it, but the stencil was a little too big for the cover, and as I was laying it out, I kind of liked how it looked off-center like this. The stencil wrapped around the spine, so I made sure to stick it down into the french groove with the bone folder.

The second step was to use a sea sponge and dab the cover randomly with dark red acrylic paint. To do this, I opened the covers so that I could paint the front and back at the same time. I let the pages dangle straight down, and used two large cardboard boxes to support the covers. This worked, but it made it difficult to get any paint into the french groove, so on future ones, I just left the book closed and did the front and back covers separately.

Next, I repeated the painting process with a brighter shade of red acrylic paint. I made sure to leave plenty of area where the dark red and even the black of the original cover, showed through.

The fourth step was to remove the paper stencil, revealing the black book cloth beneath. This was more difficult than I had thought it would be. Not that the spray glue grabbed too hard, but the paint soaked the edges of the paper stencil, and so the stencil tore at the edges, leaving behind a very visible white deckled edge along much of the pentagram's border. This I had to carefully scrape with a hobby knife to try to get the remnants of the stencil off, without damaging the paint or the book cover.

I managed to get the paper off, but there were several places that my scraping was very visible. It detracted significantly from the overall appearance of the book. I decided to try to mask the damaged areas with another layer of paint. I used a stiff bristled brush to dab on some copper acrylic paint over the most visible trouble areas. Then I used the sea sponge again with the copper paint to blend in those dab marks and hide them. I used the copper paint very sparingly. I did not want to obscure the pentagram design.

I could have just used the sea sponge with the copper paint, but there was a chance that the problem areas I was trying to hide would fall in a "dead spot" on the sponge and I would have to make several passes over the area with the sponge to get the coverage I needed. This would have made the copper too heavy handed. Using the paint brush first ensured that the worst spots were covered by the copper paint, and then the sponge would hide the deliberateness of those repaired spots. Not only did the copper highlights cover the trouble areas, it really brought the design to life. Now, I can't imaging the book without it.

The last step was to spray the entire cover with a spray sealer. It only took about an hour to paint this book, and I am very pleased with the way it turned out. It has been several years since I have made a modified journal like this. I think I need to get back to it.

Wooden Book Cover v1.0

At times, I suffer from insomnia. I can lay in bed, failing to sleep, for eight hours or more. Recently, during one of these bouts, my mind would not stop fixating on a new woodworking project. A wood covered book. So, the next day, I started working on a prototype. I wasn't 100% sure of all the details, so I used scrap pine as the material in case things didn't work out the way I had planned.

I started with a reclaimed pine 2x6. I planned to use 8.5"x11" paper folded into signatures for the text block, so I cut the board into 10" sections. I will cut it to final size (9 inches) after it is cleaned up a bit. One section got cut into 3/4" wide strips. These will become the spines. I am working on several copies at once.

The other section had to be re-sawed into thinner planks for the covers. These cover boards had to take many trips through the planer to get them flat and smooth and planed down to the proper thickness. With the spine being 1.5" thick, 3/8" thick covers would leave me a good amount of space for the text block. I had to cut another 2x6 to make enough cover boards to make three books.

Then the spines got ran through the planer to square them up and get the paint off. Once that was done, it was time to cut the channel where the text block would sit. For this, I got to use my dado stack for the first time!

A 1.5" wide spine, minus a 3/8" cover on each side, leaves a 3/4" channel in the middle for the text block. The trick to making perfectly centered dados, is to make your stack a little smaller than the width of the dado you need. Then set your fence for the gap you want on each side, and run the wood through twice. The first pass establishes the gap on the fence side, then flip the wood around and run it through again going the other direction. This will set the dame distance for the gap on the other side. That probably doesn't explain it very well, but hopefully you will get what I mean from the pictures.

In the midst of planing, one of the cover boards cracked because it had the pith running through it.  The pith is usually very weak, and should be avoided whenever possible. To salvage the board, I used super glue (cyanoacrylate) to repair the crack and strengthen the pith. While I was at it, I decided to put CA glue on all the other knots, cracks and other imperfections. In hindsight, I should have saved this step until later. Having the CA glue on the wood now means I can't use stain.

 Once the CA Glue was dry, it was all sanded smooth. Then I dug out the old router table and a round over bit to round over the edges of the boards so that the books would be nicer to handle. The only edges that did not get rounded over were the ones where the boards would meet up at the hinge.

 Now, it's time for decoration, so onto the new laser cutter! I used Inkscape to lay out the design, and burned it into the wood pieces with my Glowforge laser cutter/engraver. Although it was a big investment (about $2000) and a long wait for shipping (about 2 years!), I am glad I bought the laser. It has really opened up a lot of new possibilities for my work. I have no doubt I will outgrow this model eventually, but when that happens, now that I know what it can do for me, I wouldn't hesitate to invest in another machine (about $4k for the next step up).

 Once all the pieces were laser engraved, it was time to apply finish to the pieces before final assembly. I started with a coat of shellac, then several coats of tung oil. Tung oil gives a beautiful finish, but it is a pain to apply. Flood the surface; wait 15 minutes. If the surface soaks up the oil, reapply. When 15 minutes is up, wipe off the excess oil. Then wait 24 hours to dry. Sand lightly, then do it all again. Repeat 3-4 times. Oh, and don't work on anything else in your shop while the finish is drying, or you will get sawdust in the finish! I hate the finishing process. I'm very impatient.

Now that the covers have finish applied, it is time to start on the pages. A while back, I got a really good deal on some parchment style card stock and thought that it would make great fill pages for blank journals. So, I cracked open a pack of it and started folding the pages in half with a bone folder.

A bone folder is one of those odd tools that seems so simple as to be unnecessary. Lots of people forgo buying a bone folder, instead using something like a table knife, or a spoon, or just their hands. Let me state (again) for the record that especially for bookbinding, the quality of my results improved substantially when I started using a bone folder. Do not forgo the folder. The folder is your friend. And don't cheap out and buy the plastic kind. Get real bone. It makes a difference. It seems like it shouldn't, but it does.

I grouped the folded pages into four page signatures. Normally, I would go with 6-8 page signatures, but these pages are kinda thick (65lbs. stock). Then I used two staples at the signature fold to keep each signature together. Because the throat depth on my stapler is too shallow to reach the fold, I had to open up the stapler and staple through the signature into a block of cork (an old coaster), then fold the ends of the staple over by hand.

Once all the signatures were together and stapled, I gathered them all together into a text block, made sure the edges were square and even at the spine, and trimmed the fore edge of the text block with a guillotine style paper cutter.

This paper cutter is awesome. It is super heavy duty. I found it on Craig's List for like $60-75 in perfect condition. I looked it up online and found this model retails for $400. The only issue it has (and the #1 complaint against it in online reviews) is that it doesn't cut straight if the stack of paper is TOO SMALL. This thing is designed to cut like 300 pages at a time! If you try to cut a stack that is less than about a half inch thick, the presser foot doesn't engage properly (not enough travel in the screw adjust to make it press all the way down to the bed) and so the pages don't get held firmly to the bed. This makes them move as the blade engages, and makes for a bad cut. To combat this problem, I plan to make a removable 3/4" thick spacer strip (probably out of wood) to place between the presser foot and the pages, for use with short stacks of pages.

With the signatures all stapled and the fore edges all neatly trimmed, it was time to glue the text block into the dado on the wooden spine. I used a flexible, but very strong, glue called E6000. I laid the glue inside the dado, not going all the way to the ends, but covering a large swath in the middle, making sure that the glue was distributed across the entire width of the dado, so every signature's fold would be sure to get glued.

Before pressing the collected signatures into the dado (which was a tight fit), I glued in a ribbon bookmark. I was careful to keep the text block aligned as it was pressed into the dado. One signature didn't seat all the way down to the spine because of the tight fit, so I used a razor knife, the kind with the wide snap off blade, and slid the blade into the center of the signature (sharp side away from the fold) and pressed the fold down to the spine.

The last step was to attach the front and back cover boards with brass hinges. I used a small piece of card stock as a spacer to make sure the spacing at the top and bottom was even. Then I used an awl to mark the center of the holes, which I then pre-drilled before attaching the hinges with the brass screws.

E6000 is a very strong glue, but I wanted a little more insurance that none of the signatures would come loose, as they are not sewn together. So, I pre-drilled some holes along the side of the spine and into the text block near the folds. Then I drove in 1" brass brads from both sides. This will pin the signatures together, and pin them to the spine block as well. A tiny drop of CA glue was added under the brad head to keep it from backing out.

 And, that's it! A completed prototype of my new wooden covered book design. I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I think the pine boards look very nice, especially for scrap 2x6's. I think some nice hardwood boards would look even better. I'm going to look online and try to source some nicer looking hinges too. These were just what I could find at the hardware that would fit, and weren't too expensive. I'm looking forward to making some more of these.

It occurs to me that this is the first book, or book like thing, I have made in several years. I kinda miss book binding. One thing that sucks about having so many diverse interests; you never get to spend enough time with any of them.