A sign that it's time to step back and rethink what you're doing:

if you catch yourself trying to pare leather using your own thumb as a cutting surface.  (Fortunately, I stopped myself in time.)

The problem at hand: for the book I'm binding for the upcoming New England Guild of Bookworkers exhibition, I have a leather octopus whose head and body are decorating the front cover as cushion onlay, most of the tentacles are serving as sewing supports, and the tips of those tentacles are decorating the back cover as cushion onlay.  Unfortunately, I didn't finish the edge paring before I sewed the book.  Finishing that paring now that the leather is attached to the book is way harder than I thought (though why I didn't think it would be this hard, the world may never know).  In particular, those little tentacle tips are really difficult to 1. reach at the right angle while 2. keeping them on a firm surface and 3. holding them still.  Adding in constraint 4. no peeling myself (whose importance I'd momentarily forgotten, it seems), I've wound up with holding the tentacle tips against  a small glass vial, and thinning the edges with a bit of sandpaper wrapped around my index finger.

I showed some of my bookbinding work at Arisia, a Boston science fiction convention, in late January.  In addition to various journals and historical models, I showed my first modest foray into design binding.  The text block is a public-library discard copy of Journey to the Centre of the Earth; I prepared the text block long enough ago that I don't have a "before" picture, but it was your average tattered 1970s hardcover.

I rebound it in blue goatskin leather with a tight back; the first picture shows the paring of the edges of the leather.  You can see the marble pastry board I use as a paring stone and the  curved French paring knife.  The strop on the right has to be kept handy because paring leather requires an extremely sharp blade, and that fine edge is worn down quickly by the leather.

The closeup shows the headband, which was sewn with some linen thread I had dyed.

The front cover has concentric circles of red and brown goatskin; this is one of my first leather-onlay projects, and I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

Opening post. and a print conservation project

Welcome to my work blog!  I'll be using this to share and discuss conservation and bookbinding projects and thoughts about the field.  I'm always happy to talk shop, so please ask me questions, in comments or by email.

My most recent conservation project came to me via craigslist (with the help of an alert friend).  The client had bought a serigraph print in acrylics on paper, and it was bent in the mail.  A crease ran from top to bottom across the image, and the paint layer cracked along the crease.  You can see a detail of the damage at the right.  In person, the white showing where the paint was cracked was more jarring. 

I first re-flattened the print by lightly misting the reverse with water to relax the paper and then drying it under weight.  Once that was done, I mixed watercolors to match the colors of the print, testing them on a paper of similar color and texture.  When I was satisfied with the color matches, I used a fine sable brush to dot the watercolor into the cracked areas until the white was no longer visible.  After the paint dried, I inspected the results and touched it up slightly.  When it was done, I showed it to my husband to see whether the damage and infill were obvious to fresh eyes; he wasn't sure until I pointed out where it was.

On the left is a detail of the print after treatment; the treated area is discernible on close examination (more so in person than in the photo), but it's no longer obvious and visually distracting.  This was a fairly simple and brief project, but very satisfying.