Frustration and Appeasement

Get a nice piece of wood. Decide to make a book cover out of it. Saw it. Find a flaw. Saw it again. Check it out with paper. Wrong size. Saw it again. Decide to carve a groove in it and put in wood a different color for contrast and 'art's sake.' Cool idea. Carve it wrong. Not once but twice. The groove is too big for the wood I was going to insert. Try to find another piece to insert. Can't. Shrug shoulders ... and not for the last time on this particular project. Drill holes for the binding (to be coptic). Crack the wood. Glue it back together. Varnish it. It looks crappy. Sand it. It looks worse. Varnish it a different 

color. Bang head against a brick wall. It looks extremely bad. Sand it to smithereens. Cool. Very thin wood now, by golly.

Lather on the varnish, it doesn't look That bad. cough cough. Decide to make the back cover the front cover as the front cover doesn't look That good, either. cough. Add a few baubles and whatnot to the front and leave the back alone with its ugly groove and uglier insert.

Fold the paper for it, align the holes in the paper and cover. Decide to call it a night before termites appear and resurface the whole shebang. Still, termite trails might be an improvement....

Suffice it to say this has been one bad karmic cover which has needed salvation time and time again. But if you work on it long enough and remember two things: wood is flexible, cut-able, and adjustable, after a fashion, and sand paper is a gift from the gods, then perhaps you can salvage and even end up with a book that looks good. Or better than its karma would have made you think. 

This is a 168-page blank journal of an odd size paper (not as wide as A4 but just as tall) because the wood was not equal to any known paper size. And, as I am further from its birth pains, I have grown to like it more. Even the sewing, which went not so well, has its fine points. We live, we learn. (Does that mean, if we keep learning we'll live forever?)