The Chocolate Frog Compendium of Champions

A perfect keepsake to purchase on the last day of the Chocolate Frog Festival is a lookbook of all the Wizarding greats featured throughout the seven day extravaganza! Flip through the pages and learn more that you can get from a card. Limited edition Compendiums contain pages to take notes of the events and foods you enjoyed along the way.

Book Binding:

Start by printing all of the pages of the book. Set your quik quills to auto manufacture all the pages to your book. Be sure to charm your quill to stop when the ink well gets dry or you'll have some faded lettering! But that's part of the frustration magic of book binding, so let's roll with it. For quality assurance, imagine it looking like a PDF file.

You then arrange the pages in groups of 4 (called signatures) and fold each signature in half. A special bone folder tool helps prevent any tearing or creasing of the folded edge of the paper and creates nice crisp edges.

Small holes are pierced through all of the pages of each signature with the help of an awl. We'll need those holes to later sew the signatures together into a book.

Cotton tape is used to create a "frame" for the spine (you'll see what I mean in a moment). The sewing thread is waxed to make it more durable and easier to thread through the pages.

You sew the signatures to each other and the cotton tapes. Make sure they're all in order and none of them are upside down, or this bit will take even longer...

Then the spine is ready to be glued together. Basically, you clamp it as if it's going to a BDSM party and you slather it very generously with glue.

The glue contains a lot of water which will be temporarily absorbed by the paper. When that happens it will swell, but then it will shrink again as it dries out. If it's not clamped down securely between sheets of greyboard, that process will cause the paper to crease and deform.

Meanwhile, let's start on the covers. First we cut the cover board to size:

Then it's time for some multitasking:

In the middle: the two covers and the spine are glued to a single piece of book cloth, which will then serve to hold them together.

Left side: the back cover will be white, so I glued a sheet of paper over the cardboard and then covered it with transparent foil which will protect it and make the cover more durable.

Right side: The cardboard is still naked, but I've already raided a nearby park for plant material to decorate it with.

In the background: there's a new layer of glue on the spine. A strip of mull cloth was added to it for that purpose, so the many layers of glue have something to hang on to.

Once the spine is finally finished, time to add some bling. The edges are gilded, and sturdy endpapers are added to each side of the text block. Those are the pages that will connect the book to its case (that is to say, to its front and back cover).

Here's what it looks like with the end paper attached

Time to tackle the front cover! How much glitter is too much glitter on a book? Trick question, there's no such thing as too much.

Especially if you're compensating for the lack of yellow on the cover image... How much hot glue is necessary to attach two "laurel" branches to a cover? No idea, let me know if you figure it out. I went for a bit too much, apparently.

Then it's time to finally attach the cover to its contents. Everything is lined up and the end pages are glued to the cover. It's a good idea to put a piece of plastic wrap between each end page and the rest of the book, to prevent moisture from the glue from penetrating too deeply and creasing the paper.

Apropos creasing... Yes, you need to clamp it again. And then you have to wait for at least a day (a few is better) to dry properly before you try to open it. If at all possible, put it somewhere out of the way, where you won't see it. I swear looking at it slows down the drying process. I suspect Nargles may be involved.

Finished Product: