Bookbinding: Books 1, 2, 3 & 4

Well, I finally got all four of these mostly done. Well, as much as I'm going to do. I have to redo a signature in the star one, the pages of the dark black one have to be trimmed down, and the other two have small problems that I'm never going to fix because they're my books and a little bit of weirdness doesn't bother me, even though it would have brought my grade down in my bookbinding class I took.

I really dislike how stressed I was during that class. I love books and I love making them, but I think I would have done a better job on these if I didn't have, "so what if this would have been marked wonky! I can do anything!" in my head like a mad woman. But now that I let that go through my system, I feel much better about bookbinding in general. Less likely to freak out.

Ok, it's me, I always freak out. But usually I'm not freaking out to please someone else, but me. I haven't done that in awhile. Art school did make me a lot more chill about mistakes. No. It had nothing to do with drugs. Ever. (seriously! I'm much to high on life to ever want to get into an 'altered state') But one thing art classes did teach me was that if I can paint something good once, I can do it again. It's better to wipe out something beautiful in the wrong place and put it where it needs to go than trying to paint around it!

Bookbinding class taught me to freak out again because I had no time to do assignments and make them as perfect as I wanted and yes, it would really mess up my grade. Not a good feeling to cultivate.

No! Don't take me the wrong way!

I'm not saying we shouldn't strive for getting it perfect, we should! I'm just saying this feeling of absolute panic and failure was a bad way to go about it. It didn't make the people who weren't going to try anyway get any better and it made people who were actually trying to learn and do beautiful books miserable and not want to do it.

If we were going to make "perfect books" right out of the gate, why bother joining the class?

In my painting classes my teacher could make someone with an admittedly bad painting (someone who was trying, but just couldn't get it right, not someone who didn't try) feel better at the end of a critique, have confidence that they could be better, and feel like trying again. The grade didn't matter but he was making people try harder!

I wish I would have been able to get that from bookbinding class... I'm working on it though!