Loading…
26
My old shop teacher said something about grain direction that I ignored for 7 years and now I can't stop thinking about it
Ran into my old shop teacher Mr. Delgado at a hardware store in Tacoma a couple weeks back, first time I'd seen him since I was 19. We got to talking and he asked what I was binding these days, and when I told him I mostly do journals and rebinding old paperbacks he laughed and said "you still fighting the grain, or did you finally start going with it?" I had no clue what he meant so he grabbed a scrap of paper from his pocket, tore it both ways, and showed me how it tears straight one way and ragged the other. He said he taught me that back in class and I just nodded along and forgot it the second I walked out the door. Turns out I've been cutting all my endpapers and spine liners against the grain this whole time because it was easier to fit them on the sheet that way. I went home and tested it on a batch of 6 notebooks and the ones cut with the grain lay so much flatter it's night and day. Now I'm second guessing every board I've ever cut and wondering what else I nodded through in that class. How do you all deal with grain direction when you're trying to squeeze pieces out of a small sheet, do you just eat the waste or do you fudge it sometimes?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
john_cooper1mo ago
The bit about "you still fighting the grain" got me, because that is me with fabric of all things. I sew curtains and slipcovers, and for years I cut panels any which way just to fit them on the yardage, then stood there baffled when stuff hung crooked or sagged at the corners. Nobody ever sat me down and said selvage to selvage matters, I just thought cheap fabric was the problem. So you are not alone in nodding through the important part and remembering the doughnuts. On small sheets, I do eat the waste now, because a piece cut wrong is waste anyway, it just looks like progress until you hang it up. My rule is if the grain runs the wrong way on something that has to hang flat or take stress, I recut it, and I only fudge it on seams and facings where nobody sees and nothing pulls. Six notebooks is a cheap lesson, some of us paid a lot more.
4