The day I realized I had been trimming book cloth wrong for 15 years

Last Tuesday I was at a workshop in Portland and the instructor watched me trim my book cloth with scissors. She quietly handed me a sharp rotary cutter and a straightedge and said try this. I had been fighting with wavy edges and fraying threads for over a decade thinking that was just normal. After one clean cut with the rotary tool I felt pretty silly I hadn't figured this out sooner. Has anyone else had that moment where a simple tool swap changed everything?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_jana13d ago

Does your cousin still talk to you after that gift? Probably not since you ruined his whole self-image of being a garage master with basic tools. I went back and recut one old book project and it was like comparing a toddler's drawing to a pro print job.

river_fox1813d ago

My cousin spent 12 years restoring old motorcycles in his garage using nothing but wrenches and screwdrivers. Last Christmas I got him one of those cordless ratchets and he called me furious asking why nobody told him about them sooner. He said it was like going from a butter knife to a chef's knife in terms of how easy things got. Now I'm wondering what other basic tools I'm probably missing out on for my own hobbies. Did you ever go back and redo old projects with the rotary cutter just to see how much better they could have been?