After making the card casing and attaching the spine support, I'm now ready to back this with the final material. Ordinarily I'd be using either book cloth (thick, tough cloth that will take a lot of wear) or paper, but for this project I'm using t-shirt material.
This is quite an easy process, but it's easy to mess up! First of all I cut a piece of material the size of the book boarding with about a 1cm border around each side. This will be folded down on the inside of the casing, and when the book block is fixed in you won't be able to see the edges, just the indentations of where they end (which you can see on most hard backed books!).
I use PVA glue and put a thin coating on the outer side of the card, I then place this onto the fabric in the centre, keeping the borders in place. Turning the whole thing over, I smooth down the fabric onto the boards using a bone folder, being careful not to rough up any of the fabric, or stretch it out of shape.
Turning it back to the inside, ready to turn the borders to the inside of the casing, I need to cut the fabric off the corners but leave a 3mm border still. I do this for every corner. Starting with the top border, I thinly put some glue on the card casing and glue it down. I do the same for the bottom side, and then the left and right sides. When i'm doing the sides, I make sure that the corners of the fabric where I cut the triangles away remain neat, kind of like hospital corners.
This casing needs to be left to dry, preferably under some heavy books, for at least a day before the next (and final!) step can be undertaken.
