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PSA: try waxed dental floss for headbands and sewing signatures, it saved my last 3 projects
So last month I was rebinding a beat up copy of The Hobbit for a regular at the bar who wanted it fixed for his kid. I got to the headband part and my usual linen thread kept snapping because the spine curve was a pain. My sister is a dental hygienist in Boise and she left a spool of that flat waxed floss on my counter when she visited. I figured why not, and that stuff grabbed the signatures way tighter than my normal thread and it doesn't slip when you do a kettle stitch. I did a full reback on a 1940s cookbook after that and the floss held up fine, no fraying at the needle eye at all. The only catch is you have to use the unflavored kind or your book smells like mint for a week, ask me how I know. Have any of you tried it on leather bindings, or does it cut through the spine too much?
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the_cora11d ago
Have you tried it on a leather spine yet without the wax rubbing off on the cover? I always figured floss was a gimmick and stuck with linen thread for years, mostly because I watched a guy wreck a Bible with it back in 2019 and it put me off the whole idea. Then my thread kept snapping on a tight spine and I grabbed some unwaxed floss as a last resort, and it pulled the signatures in way tighter than my usual stuff. The mint thing is real though, I did one book with flavored floss and it smelled like a dentist office for two weeks.
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