Work Assigned: In the following Imaging Class, we were assigned to show our faculty our work up until now and we were to create a prototype for our final book on 5′ by 5′ paper showing our work with the binding.
Process: I shared my work with my faculty and I was instructed to make a few minor changes regarding some photo editing and some elements that were unnecessary to be removed. I then went on to make a printed prototype of my book, using my dad’s black and white office printer (the only one i could work on during the time of lockdown). I had to teach myself the process of making a Japanese bind to bind my book using the materials available at home i.e a needle and a very thin thread.
Reflections: While making the printed prototype I realized that I had made a few errors while exporting my file for print. My pages were lacking a margin adequate to fit in the Japanese bind and I had exported the file where the print output was designed for a saddle stitch bind. I had also forgotten to select the option of facing pages and therefore some of my content was spread over two disjointed pages. Thirdly I had exported my print in a print booklet format which because of the previous error made everything even more out of place. Therefore I had to use my home vegetable cutting board and blade to cut the book to rearrange the pages in chronological order before trying to perform the Japanese bind. Now, after I had arranged the pages in order, I had tried to perform the bind with the given material, I had never performed stitching before in my life so i had made a mess out of the task, the thread as it was extremely thin it knotted itself several times and i had to untangle and tangle repeatedly to achieve the steps mentioned in a video i referred to. By the end of it, I had been able to achieve the bind, but it wasn’t as neat as it was shown in the video, mainly because of the fact that the thread was much thicker in the video and mine was extremely thin and it was tougher to keep it untangled and also because the dimensions in my prototype had to be scaled down to three holes instead of four, so the process was a bit different and I being a beginner could not figure it out. I did not expect perfection, therefore I wasn’t disappointed that much, I was infact, happy with my effort as the purpose of the bind was successful and that it was not very extremely out of place aesthetically.
Learning Portfolio 