Took me 3 years to stop using cheap PVA for my spine linings

For like 2 years I just grabbed whatever piece of cloth and glued it down without thinking. I figured it was all the same, right? Then I finished a batch of 5 journals back in March and 3 of them had this weird rippling on the spines. A guy at the local guild meetup in Portland pointed out I was gluing against the grain. He showed me a before and after on his own project and the difference was night and day. The cloth lays flat now and the corners don't bubble up. Now I check every roll before I cut. Has anyone else made this mistake and just assumed it was a glue problem?

3 comments

3 Comments

shane_moore877d ago

Hold up - I actually disagree a little bit here. @green.jessica I get where you're coming from and the grain thing is real, but I think people overhype how much fabric direction matters for spine linings. I've been using the same cheap PVA for years and my early bubbled spines were more about using way too much glue than the cloth cut. I wet the stuff down too thin and it soaked through, thats what caused my rippling. Once I laid off the glue and just used a thin coat everything flattened out even with cross-grain cuts. I'm not saying grain direction doesnt matter at all, but I see beginners blame it for problems that are really about glue thickness or pressure during drying. Theres more than one way to get a smooth spine.

lisa_brown6d ago

Yeah I remember reading somewhere that the glue-to-water ratio is way more critical than people think, and that thinner layers actually bond better without distorting the material. Isnt it funny how we all chase the perfect fix when the real culprit is just heavy-handed application?

green.jessica7d ago

Wait, three years?! That stings to read because I literally just figured this out myself two months ago. I was in the exact same boat - blaming the glue, blaming the humidity, blaming everything except the fabric direction. It took a friend at my local meetup to point out my cloth was cut wrong too, and I felt like such an idiot. The bubbling drove me nuts, but now that I check the grain before every single cut, the spines come out smooth every time. Honestly, I think half the issues people chalk up to bad materials are actually this one trick we never got taught.