{"id":118,"date":"2008-01-24T02:54:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-24T02:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.notuboc.com\/?p=118"},"modified":"2008-01-24T02:54:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T02:54:00","slug":"fact-68-a-few-notes-on-nerdage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notuboc.com\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"FACT 68 – a few notes on NERdage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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i recently found myself giving a lecture on NERdage, specifically, the NERdage i recently produced in the form of a full-on replica Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Grail Dairy. it was ordered by a guy who saw my previous efforts<\/a>, and it took me about three weeks. to be perfectly frank, i undercharged him a little, but, as stated above, i was compensated in other ways. (^_^) my mother blurted out at our church choir meeting last week about my project, so i decided to bring the finish product with me this week. when our singing was over, i announced my show and tell, and was soon surrounded by the entire choir – admitedly only about 10 people, but we’ll overlook that little detail in the interest of storytelling – eager to hear me explain every little detail of my newest creation, up to and including the small points on which my version differs from the several prop versions – the cover material, page order, and hitler’s signature – and the many NERdages in which my sister and i were forced to engage – christ, that sound porny – in order to produce the coolest possible diary – sooo many clips from YouTube watched, sooo<\/a> many<\/a> sites<\/a> visited<\/a>…<\/p>\n

the pictures of this NERd quest can be found at flickr<\/a>, there are 12 shots, including some of the pages, and most of the inserts i made. for those of you already sick with the NERdage in this post, i urge you to bail now. for the rest of you, notes on my creation process follow:<\/p>\n

i started by dunking each page in coffee – specifically a french roast – to get that nice aged look and color, and then i divided them up into signatures – sections of pages folded together for those of you not up on your bookbinding parlance. i printed out the pictures from the above-mentioned web sources, traced them all onto the pages using a uniball pen that’s out of ink – luff that thing, i do – and graphite paper – i swear i looked like a coal miner for a few days there – and then used a couple of different sizes of pilot V pen to ink them all. i then moved on to writing all the text in, altering my handwriting slightly to get a closer match with henry jones’s – not like that required much work, my handwriting and his are surprisingly similar in the sloppy category. then it was time for binding, and the question that i had been avoiding for days: what material to bind with. i don’t have any leather, so i had first intended to go with some dark ultrasuede i have lying around, but i also have some lighter suede-textured contact paper, and it struck me that this contact paper was similar in color to the way the diary must have looked when it was new. so i covered the journal in that stuff and pressed the heck out of it on my pretty handmade book press. then i aged it fastwind style with some olive oil and some elbow grease.<\/p>\n

then it was out to the porch for a little aging of the inserts! my customer – whose NERdness i am not worthy to contemplate (^_^) – found me an unmutilated photo of the grail rubbing, so i printed out the grail rubbing and then rubbed it on the concrete of my porch to give it a stone texture. i would say this is the least perfect part of the diary, but it still looks alright. the inserts were a super blast! i got to exploit my paper fetish, as many inserts needed to be crafted from different types of paper. there was the light typewriter paper for the letters – and yes, i did use an actual typewriter for those, i have three – the newsprint for the newspaper articles – complete with fake ads on the back – the cardstock for the tickets, the photo paper for the old portrait, and even a funeral card from indiana’s mother’s funeral.<\/p>\n

all in all, a good day’s<\/strike> three weeks’ work for a NERd…<\/p>\n

edit<\/span>: one more picture for the masses:<\/p>\n

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