I tried making a special edition of my book | Gilded edges (not a book binder!)

hello so if you've been following this channel then you probably know that my debut novel powerless came out at the time of filming a few days ago so this is the hard cover version I am really happy with the cover design I like the dust jacket it has a matte finish so it just it feels really nice like I keep wanting to rub my fingers over it underneath the dust jacket though is another story so I did my printed books through Ingram spark which is a distributor that you basically upload the print ready files for your book so that's a PDF of the pages and a PDF of the cover design and they will distribute that via their print on demand system so what that means is every time someone orders a copy of your book they will print it out so this is a good option for self-published authors because it means you don't need to print out 5,000 copies and have them have them go moldy in a garage somewhere now paperbacks are fairly straightforward cuz there you've got the text file and the cover file hard covers have a a few different options so there's one option which is case laminate where the cover design is printed directly onto the hard cover of the book then you have a dust jacket option which is what I've got so you have the dust jacket which is here you have that as well as case lemonade so that means you have your dust jacket and then on the hard actual cover of the book you also have a design printed it could match the cover it could be something different and then the third option is case laminate plus J cloth now as someone who grew up with hard cover books that traditionally have like a cloth like linen type of binding I thought okay digital cloth is what I want I want something like the books I grew up with and this is how it looks so what we have here is basically a cloth design printed directly onto the cover of the book what you can't see is that there is no texture here so I knew it wouldn't be real cloth but I thought it would be some sort of textured paper like you'd feel some sort of grain um I don't know I don't even know how to describe what I expected but you know how some paper has like a physical texture there imprints and things I thought they would try to recreate the feel of cloth with that but instead it is completely smooth so it's sort of weird when you look at it and you have something that looks like cloth but is not I saw this and wasn't 100% happy with it but didn't have time to change it before the launch and then I discovered bookbinding Instagram or specifically a page called that's my bookshelf where this woman is rebinding all of her paperbacks so they look like the penguin clothbound Classics and I looked at this and thought ooh maybe I can do that so um yeah I'm going to try creating new binding for this I have no book binding experience I have five copies of the hard cover that I ordered for myself I could potentially destroy them all so this is going to be great so here I'm attempting to add foil to the edges of my book I'm using thecraft Deco foil um obviously the purple color and the process which I got online is to sand the book edges until they're really smooth then go over them with a mix of PVA and water so 50/50 split attach the foil and then iron it on until it adheres after which you let it cool peel it off and hopefully you'll have beautiful foil edges so it's been about an hour and 20 minutes since I applied the purple foil to the edge of the pages so let's see how well these have stuck this is similar to what happened last time we've got so some really good coverage but we've also got these gaps here and then the edge is um really frayed and I know that as soon as I break the pages apart that's going to peel some more yeah I'm not really sure how to get a better result than what we can see here with the peeling at the edges cuz I feel like I did the right thing like I did everything right so you know I sanded properly and um focused on ironing and uh let it dry and this is like a better result than it was last time but still it's not perfect yeah I don't know I guess we sand it off and try again the other option is like putting a second layer of foil on top this one and hopefully that leads to complete coverage but what I found is that the foil doesn't stick as well to the foil as it does to paper so what ends up happening is like you get a little bit more stuck on but then you've also got the PVA glue on top of the good foil that you have yeah I guess I'll that's what we've got can see the parts where the coverage isn't complete so guess we'll do it again thir third time a [Music] charm something I should say is that I didn't have the idea to Vlog this until today and I have actually already done some stuff to try and you know create my own special limited edition book so I'll take you through what I've done so far so the ultimate vision is I want the hard cover books to have colored edges I want it to be clothbound and I want there to be like a foil like design on the cloth binding so first I was looking at spraying the edges and you can't see the version of powerless that I tried spraying cuz I've since sanded that back but here's um another book this is actually one of the ones I happen to publish through grammar Factory so I have a few copies and you can see that I've sprayed the edges in purple well this looks quite nice when it's sort of closed like this if you look closer you can see that the paint does bleed around the edges if I um fold the pages a little bit so they splayed out it also looks quite uneven I think the main issue here is that I have the wrong spray paint now turns out spray paint's really hard to get at least if you want it in purple I didn't realize so the there's Office Works which is like a stationary office supply chain here and they had a spray paint cabinet but the paints they had were like graffiti paints so what I found is it's really heavy when I'm spraying on the corners of the book so that makes it really hard to get even coverage without having a really thick layer of paint I um might still consider spraying if I can get a lighter spray paint like something that has more of an airbrush effect where I can build but this was the original approach I was going to have sprayed edges then my sister sent me a Tik Tok of someone doing DIY foil edges or gilded edges so I thought why not give that a try so I ordered some silver foil and some uh purple foil and I tried that on another couple of books so here's the first one I tried doing foil edges on which um really didn't turn out that well so if you look closely you can see it's peeling quite a bit the bottom is not as bad but the top is peeling quite a bit the sides the texture is very rough I'm not sure how well you can see it and um I can't get all of the pages apart so I think that's for a couple of reasons one is I just use too much glue the other one is that I did all three sides before breaking the pages apart so um not doing that anymore I'm doing one side at a time so the next book I did it just did the one side here I did wait for it to cool which I think helped lead to a better result and um I did still need to separate the pages but they're all like separated now um it is a little bit patchy I didn't work on getting a perfect result so if you look closely you can see there's some patchiness there but I I felt like it was a good enough test case which is why I'm now trying with powerless so now the plan is to have the purple foil edges if I can't crack that puzzle if I can't get a good result then I might try getting a new spray paint and spraying again but I don't know I'm feeling good about the foil I think if it works it's going to look amazing it's just a matter of getting to the point where it works so round two of the foil edges has been applied I'm going to let that sit for an hour or so to cool down before I take it off and hopefully it looks good this time while waiting I'm going to head out to Spotlight which is like a craft and fabric store and pick up some metallic ironon vinyl which I'll use for the design I have in mind for the cover there are so many options so do I want something I know I want silver but do I want it like with more of a matte finish o 20% off lucky me or I could get something more metallic which is what I originally had in mind but I don't see silver there is this rose gold which could be pretty though I'm back it's now the moment of truth no the edges again okay I'm going to try let's let the iron heat up again I'm going to try just adding a little bit of glue to the areas where it hasn't stuck and maybe I can get it to stick on again cuz honestly I don't really know what else I could do to make it stick more effectively I mean the other option would be using the silver instead because that isn't as noticeable yeah see the problem with this is like I get glue on top of the foil that has stuck so that's then going to have a glue residue which I don't want oh actually no there's no point in even doing this um CU look at the rest of it so this is actually worse than before like you can see all of that space where it hasn't fully covered yeah I don't know what to do okay we're just going to try going over the foil and see how that turns out cuz didn't turn out well when I tried it with the silver but I haven't tried it with the purple so maybe that is the solution so I can already see that this is isn't adhering very well to the foil cuz there are like air bubbles and creases that didn't happen when I was going directly onto the paper but um yeah we'll see how it goes no worst case scenario is I need to sand it off again so that time was interesting cuz I can already see it peeling back from the plastic um just from using the bone folder over it so hopefully that means it's adhered well but in in any case I'm going to let it cool for a bit and then come back to it if this time doesn't work I think I'm going to have to go back to the spray paint idea which means I need to find new spray paint H so while we wait for the latest attempt to cool down I'm going to look at the design I want on the cover so this is something I had an idea for the design I wanted to use the spiky DNA that features in the cover design around Hannah's wrists and I had this idea which would have spiky DNA like in a silver foil against the black cloth of the book so I mocked this up in Photoshop but unfortunately Photoshop only does restor images which use pixels and to sum it up at least my understanding is that it means you can't resize things and maintain the same quality it will get fuzzy if you stretch it or Shrink it too much so that was not fit for my purposes because I found that everything was getting fuzzy and I want it to be really crisp especially if I'm using it to cut out vinyl that will then be put on the book cover so I got my husband who was a former graphic designer to put it into illustrator and turn it all into a vector image which is done and the layout is different here because I'm using his computer my laptop's in the shop so um unfortunately I can't do this on my own computer so he's recreated the design I had in mind but there are a couple of little bits that he hasn't done the way I want so now I'm going to try and figure out how illustrator works so I can fix the little bits that I'm not happy with and then and then we'll try printing it out I can't apply it yet obviously because the cover of the book that I'm working on is all covered while I get the pages sorted out but it's something I can do while I'm waiting for the foil to stick to the pages this is the most frustrating part of the process like more frustrating than trying to apply foil to my edges several times and it not sticking properly or more frustrating and spraying the edges and the paint bleeds like software that isn't intuitive drives me insane and maybe like illustrator is intuitive for designers but I'm not a designer I feel like Photoshop is fairly intuitive like you can sort of Click your way around and figure out the major functions you can go online and get some tutorials illustrator is just a whole other kind of worms and um it's just so timec consuming trying to figure it out so basically I have the file the original DNA file that was used for the handcuffs on the cover of the book I manually added spikes to them in Photoshop which I shouldn't have done hubby then turned it into a vector illustration and re um compiled the cover design for me which great very helpful the problem is the chain of DNA is like that image stuck together three times and the ends where the two images meet haven't been Blended for all of the strands of DNA so I'm trying to figure out how to blend them I can't so I'm adding like a little bit of a line in between each piece of DNA and hopefully that will fill the Gap and make it look like a single image problem is somehow I've deleted the color that was used to fill in the design and I don't know how to get it back cuz when I click on it and when I look at the layers which has a preview it still has the color just the big screen doesn't have the color and I don't even know how to Google how to solve this cuz I don't know what problem is so I'm exporting this now hopefully it works the next challenge is that this isn't the only piece of software I need because so illustrator is first design was in Photoshop moved to illustrator cuz it needs to be Vector now I've got to move it over to the Cricut design space so Cricut is the machine I'm using to print this out it's basically like a cutting machine so what it does is for each of the lines it will cut into the vinyl so what I'll what I should have when I print it out out is this lovely Silver version of the design where I can pull out all of the bits that are the spaces in between and then I can apply that to the book if it works who knows so this is what's come through in the Cricut design space so the color has come back no idea how or why but if I zoom in you can oh can see there are still these gaps between the pieces of DNA which was what I wanted to fill I've also lost the rectangle that was around here and I don't know where it's gone so this is very annoying anyway it's been more than an hour so let's see if the third attempt of foiling the edges of my book has worked o no I already know this is going to win badly oh it's so stuck H okay so um this is sort of what I expected would happen so we've got full coverage now which is good um obviously like that end will need to be sanded back but yeah a little bit of patchiness here but we can see sort of the glue on top of the foil so not perfect however it is the fullest coverage I've had so I think I'll take it out of the press and split the pages apart and just see how it looks once um yeah the pages are broken apart [Music] I'm trying to find a good place to sit cuz um the afternoon sun's coming in maybe that way I don't know I think that we'll have to do anyway I've um so this is what the edge of the book looks like um I think I'm going to have to sand it back again CU even though like from a distance it looks cool um and I've sort of broken up like sections but when I'm trying to break up Page by Page it's um really tough and I think it's cuz of the two layers of foil like it feels really sticky and stretchy um almost like you know those notepads where you've got like the there's no binding or anything there just the sticky bit across the top and you peel off page after page and you've got that sticky residue off the top the foil is like that sticky residue so if we look at the couple of pages at the very end where I've started taking where I've separated Page by Page like you can see that doesn't have a clean line of foil on the end neither does this one and it's getting a bit ragged already um because it's too thick to split with the pages so just excuse the helicopter we live near an airport it's not like a big commercial airport but occasionally you get helicopters going by um so yeah I could continue trying to pull the rest of the pages apart but I don't think any point cuz I'm going to continue getting this really ragged yeah these really ragged edges which is not what we want so um yeah sanding [Music] again okay I have separated the pages after attempt 4 and it's not looking great in fact it's looking um I mean it's sort of like an older book when you know you've got a book with those foil edges and it just starts to peel over time so definitely not what I wanted um what's interesting is the areas that are peeling are the areas where I did do the second layer so yeah that patch approach for repairing it not so good when you separate things I also noticed that the very beginning and very end pages are the ones that are in the worst condition um they were also the hard to pry apart the middle Pages were really really easy to peel apart so we have you know a section in the middle which is pretty good and then at the end um they got a lot gummier and that's the section where they were sort of squeezed out and you know flared over the tops of the wood that tells me that I definitely need to push the wood up to the very edge of the page when I'm sanding and when I'm applying this it's a little bit frustrating cuz I feel like the test I did with now this other book the other day that went pretty well it was just one layer it is a bit patchy but it was really easy to peel apart and that gave me the confidence to continue with my book yet now this is the fourth attempt today and um it's still not working very well and I feel like I've done a lot of damage just to those very beginning and very end Pages because um they were pressed out and over the wood I'm going to try and press the entire book together tonight and hopefully that will flatten it out but I'm not sure how much luck I I'll have so yeah I really just wish I tested with some other books that I was planning to you know donate um before doing it on one of mine cuz if I keep ruining all my books I'm going to have to buy more at this stage I don't know whether I'm going to continue with the Gilded approach or if I'll go back to the Sandpaper I feel like continually sanding and reapplying this to the edge of my pages isn't the best option though I'm probably damaging the structural Integrity of the pages for lack of a better expression which is making them weaker which is then going to make the foil less likely to stick so yeah I'm not sure what the best approaches so today I tried foiling another like sample book to see how it would go and it actually went really well I used the silver foil again and the result was really good really even coverage not patchy at all not peeling at all and I did a couple of things different so I thought okay I'm going to try it with powerless again and I'm getting the same result like I did everything right for lack of a better term I did everything that I did with the other book that led to a good result and it looked okay until I started breaking the pages apart and then when I started breaking the pages apart the foil is sticking to itself so it's sort of peeling away from the pages which means the end result is really patchy and I don't know if that's because of the type of paper or because I've just over sanded this book so the edges aren't um solid enough to it here well so when I say the type of paper the other book I used for the sample I believe the paper weight was 100 GSM so GSM stands for G per square meter I think and it basically means how heavy the paper is and this usually translates to thickness so typical paper you'd find in your printer is usually like 80 GSM so 100 GSM is like pretty thick for a standard paperback so I think that meant there was more um surface area for the foil to stick too so when I split the pages apart it didn't peel in the same way I believe my books which are printed through Ingram sparker 75 GSM so that's a bit thinner so there isn't as much surface area the other thing is that I've sanded them multiple times now because I tried spray painting them and this is the fifth time I've tried applying the purple foil so every time I've sanded after that and I think that's probably damaging the edge of the paper so for this book I think um it's time to give up on the foil and get some spray paint instead and just spray the edges purple having said that I'm not entirely giving up on the foil yet I'm going to do a test book with the purple just so I can see if it's the purple that's reacting differently rather than just powerless being a difficult book to do this on because it could potentially be something um in the color that makes it react a little bit differently so I'll do I'll spray this book I'll do a test of the purple foil on another book and if I can get a good test result then I might try adding the foil edges to another one of my hard covers but I only have five so it's a limited Supply so I've given up on the purple foil for this book I think I mentioned last time that I did a test book with silver foil I've done a few tests with silver foil and they have worked really well the last ones have went perfectly I went okay I'm going to try that method and when I tried it on powerless it did not go well so I thought I'll do a purple foil test on another book with a similar paper weight and the same thing happened actually so it applied really well it looked great until I broke the pages apart and I did wait like a couple of hours so it had really um settled and yeah unfortunately it started cracking and peeling so I think there might be something to do with the color added to the purple foil which means it doesn't adhere as well so I've sanded back the edges of powerless yet again and now we're going to try purple spray paint and maybe I'll try one with silver foil later so this is the second time I've attempted spraying it the last time I had in fact I'll see if I can find it I had the only brand of paint that was available at my local stationer store which is this um Montana uh yeah Montana black which says it's meant for graffiti artists so understandably paint is very thick and that meant it um like sort of spattered on it was really hard to get full coverage without getting a really thick layer of paint so now I've got this liquitex one which is acrylic hopefully goes on much lighter and then I can build up to full coverage so let's see so far so good so that go on much lighter than the previous one I was able to build a bit I might not have perfect coverage around the edges just cuz I didn't want to get too thick cuz I don't know how many times I can sand this book before I have no pages left so I'm going to leave it clamped like this until that edge dries um just so I don't risk it bleeding into the pages and then I'll try the outer edges the purple is a lot cooler than the last one I had in fact um if you look at the boards that I'm clamping it with you can see the old color and I don't like this one as much but they only had very blue purples so we'll see how it goes so you can see these are how the edges are looking just break apart the pages a little yeah I think this turned out really well so this is what we're looking at obviously I've still got the wrapping paper around the edges so this is looking quite good um definitely obviously not getting the issues that I had with the foil where you have the really sticky layer peeling back cuz it's just spray paint it's a lot thinner and I don't think I've got any bleed you can see there are some bits like this which are blotchy but that's from the last time cuz I don't know how well this will show up on camera but um you can see the paint color is actually warmer so I think I'll give the book a proper look through but I don't think this one at all so really happy with this result I think I could have gone another layer cuz you can see there are some bits where the coverage isn't complete it's also at the very edges of the book can see that it's a bit patchy which I could see happening when I was spraying but I think part of it is just because the wrapping that I've got over the edges bends out a little bit so it makes it harder to get into the edges but yeah given all of the trouble I was having with the foil and all of the trouble I was having with this book specifically I'm pretty happy with this result I think I'll see what it looks like once I've got the cover done as well and then make a decision about whether I do another layer of paint so um this particular copy of the book is never going to be perfect cuz I've got the damage from well one the earlier spray paint but also from applying the foil um there are like like can see just there are markings on the first Pages where I had the wood clamp to it but given what I had this morning I think it's looking pretty good so we now have one book with spray edges not perfect but it's looking pretty good and we have a test book that has like I mean it's a bit hard to see on film but has the silver foil on one Edge and it came out perfect L I'm going to try and foil one more copy of powerless this time in the silver instead of the purple and hopefully that works if not we'll just spray all of [Music] them so the foil has been applied um a little bit awkward to use my camera like this but the coverage looks pretty solid which is good however the purple version like the most recent one I did looked like that as well and then it all fell apart when I tried to break apart the pages so I'm going to let that cool for half an hour an hour and then I'll try breaking the pages apart and hopefully it doesn't all [Music] peel I've relocated because taking this apart one page at a time is a very slow process and unfortunately it's starting to peel so really disappoint with that it's definitely not as bad as the purple was but if um you look at the pages you can see like there are certain areas that are a bit patchy where the pages have been separated but I'm not sure how else to separate the pages like the tutorials I've seen say sort of just bend the pages back and forth but that doesn't actually separate them all so I always start with that but then you've got to go through one by one and peel them apart and as I peel them apart some of the foil is coming off so I I'll see how this looks when I get to the end of it but um I think we're going to have to go with the sprayed edges rather than the foil edges which is a shame but the sprayed edges look cool as well so this section here is where I've been peeling the pages apart and you can see the area that looks a bit rougher that's where the foil is peeling versus this front section where there are a couple of sections that have been broken apart but I haven't done Page by page so it's not looking good many many minutes later and this is the final result after separating the pages so um unfortunately it doesn't look amazing the most annoying part actually is there are some bits that look great like look at the top towards the left the left half at the top there that looks perfect but then you get down here and that um texture you see is where it has peeled a bit and then down at the bottom we've got a lot more peeling so I don't really know what else I can do to get better results it was fine until I separated the pages so maybe if anyone knows a better way to separate the pages but the way this looks at the moment I'm basically trying to decide obviously I couldn't sell something like this but I'm like does it look good enough to give it as a gift to someone or should I just sand it back so I know the last time I tried to foil the edges of my books I said was going to be the last time but I've decided to give it one more try because I'm trying a new brand of foil this one I found in a You tutorial about gilding book edges you don't need any glue to attach this one and I have a feeling that's what's causing the problem with my pages when I try to separate them I think the glue is basically sticking when I try to separate the pages and when I separate them the glue is peeling off so the foil is peeling off whereas this one is just heat activated it doesn't need any so I'm hoping if I apply this then the pages will just break apart beautifully and it will look lovely what that means though is I need to s the book again cuz I've got to get the last layer of foil off so [Music] fun we have a winner so I just cracked the pages open and they they break apart beautifully I ended up doing four layers of foil because um I didn't get even coverage on the first couple but yeah I'm really happy with how this side is looking so now I've got to do the short [Music] sides hello this is future editing Jackie here as you can see this video has gotten a bit long so I'm going to split it into two parts and in the next one we will cover the cover so please stay tuned subscribe if you haven't already and that video will be up in the next few days bye