Once I was happy with the screen printed front cover, I began with the binding process. I established early on in the brief that I wanted to use saddle stitching to bind the pages together, I was just unsure of how many holes I wanted to punch. I knew that I wanted it to look stitched down the spine, so I needed to punch a number higher than 3 that was uneven. I decided to punch 15 holes. This proved pretty difficult because of the combined thickness of the stock that I chose to use in the end. The graphite stock that I used for the front cover was 330gsm, and the inner pages were 120gsm. This proved pretty challenging to stab through, and in hindsight I really should have used the drilling machine instead of the stabbing tool. I will not make that mistake again, I've learned from experience. There are several things that I could have done to avoid this, and the fundamental errors I made lay in the stock decisions and binding decisions. I should have researched a more appropriate binding method that was more suited to my content, layout and stock.
The number of stabs made resulted in cracking of the ink on the stock, and ruined the outside of the spine on the front cover. This unfortunately means that I am going to have to re-print and bind my book, for self satisfaction and to make sure my submission is as strong as it can be. For the final crit I used a simple three hole saddle stitch technique, so that I had something physical to discuss and critique in the session.
The final issue I had was to do with the registration marks of the screen print. I based all of the cropping at the final stage on the registration/crop marks on the screen printed cover, which was a silly mistake to make. I should have been more careful when registering the screen and the paper, to make sure the print was centrally aligned on the page. Or, I should have cropped and folded the cover to the correct size before binding.
I am most likely going to reprint the content of the book on lighter stock, and use another one of my screen prints as the cover for the submission.
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