MiT book, the wrap around cover printed!

The sheets that I tinted the other night for the cover were finally dry. They soaked up a lot of water and, naturally, puffed way up. I spent a couple of hours burnishing to get a printable surface. Here's the pile:



The sheet on the right has been burnished; the sheet on the left not. Not sure if you can see the difference.



This is the right half of the image to be printed on the cover. Her name is Martha, and I'm hoping that it's readable that the paper chain people are the 'M' in her name. This design makes more sense once you read the text on the inside.



The text reads, on the 1st page (formatted as the page itself, except the page is right justified):

Take
my hand
And follow
my lead, Let us
go on an adventure
I won’t say that
it’ll be pretty
or perfect
I Will
Say

Then on the 4th page (again, same formatting, except it's right justified):

Like a walk thru a wild
place, flowers, weeds

and trees with
big roots
you



learn to
get around

make this walk
your walk, make
this place, your place


Originally, I had thought that I'd make all the books look somewhat similar on the outside, but wildly different on the inside. And in order to do that, and have it work for every book, the covers would have to be somewhat plain. But as I was finishing this book, I realize that my Rock Star senior really would not enjoy a book that looks so plain on the outside. She loves colors, and she loves designs. I do want each person to like the books she gets, so I've decided that it's each book for itself.

So here I've printed the right side and I'm ready to print the left side. It's a similar continuation of the design:



I'm finished printing, yay!



It dried pretty quickly, and by tonight, I was able to sew the first cover onto the text block.

Then I discovered that the tinted halves of the sheets shrank! Not by much, but it's definitely a smidgen smaller than the inner sheet. (The Nepal Heavyweight is pretty heavy, but not quite heavy enough to use as cover by itself, so the plan was to double up, the outer sheet tinted and printed, the inner sheet just plain.) I decided to let it be.

Here I am, part way through sewing the cover sheets to the text block.



Tada!



I still need to sew on the button and crochet a string for closure, and I completely forgot that I was going to do that before I stitched the cover to the text block (so I can hide the button workings on the inside). And, I glued the reinforcement fabric to the inside cover sheet, so I'll just have to sew it through both sheets now.