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I've been cutting my book cloth wrong for a whole year
I was working on a custom journal for a client last month, trying to get the cover material to lay flat around the boards. No matter how careful I was, I'd get these tiny wrinkles at the corners that I'd have to hide. I was blaming the glue or the cloth quality. Then I watched a video from a binder in Portland, and she said something simple: 'Always cut your cloth with the grain running parallel to the spine, not across it.' I had been cutting it whichever way the piece fit on my table to save material. I tried her way on a test piece, and the cloth just stretched and folded so much cleaner. It was a total facepalm moment. I wasted so much good linen trying to fight the material's natural give. Has anyone else had a basic technique click way later than it should have?
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troy8326mo ago
I always thought grain direction was for paper, not cloth. That Portland video made me recheck all my material specs last week.
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luna8246mo ago
That Portland binder's tip about grain direction seems so obvious now. Honestly, I wonder how many other basic material properties we overlook to save scraps. It makes me question what else I might be doing the hard way.
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