One time when Anya was in our apartment, we told her she was famous and showed her the post (June 5) about the dinner we had with her parents, that we'd said how wonderful her Lord of the Rings book is and how we wished we'd gotten some pictures of it to share. Recently she brought her book to a meeting so we could get those pictures of it, so today the blog is all about her amazing book.
As a reminder and for those who missed the first blog, here's what we said about it previously: We found out Anna is a BIG Lord of the Rings fan. She read the three books in Russian, and then she and a friend tried to get copies in English because they wanted to read them in the language they were originally written in. When they couldn't get the books, they found them on the internet, printed them out and spent 6 months making their own book of over 700 pages. She made a fabric cover for it, complete with a silver tree embroidered on the front. It was the first time she had ever embroidered anything but it looked professionally done. She said she took the pattern from the tunic of a warrior in a scene in one of the movies. They drew maps and dipped them in tea to make them look like parchment. They hand numbered the pages. They even included pictures from some of the movies. Then they sewed the pages together by hand. It was AMAZING! The funny thing is after all that they tried reading it in English but couldn't because there were too many words they couldn't understand or find the translation for.
Even if you're like me and not a Lord of the Rings fan, you can't help but be impressed by all the work they put into this.
The cover
They glued the bookmark ribbon into the binding.
They didn't have a color printer, so when they found color pictures they wanted to add, they planned where to put them and tried to guess how much room they would need and left space when they were printing out the text. Sometimes it got a little tricky because they needed to match up pages that had words they didn't understand! Then they took the printed pages to someone who could print the pictures and added them in. They did an amazing job and all the pictures look like they were part of the original print job, not added in later.
The maps were a major time commitment. They did a great job. All the maps look like they were done by one person. We asked Anya about it and she said that their styles are similar and so it looked like one person's work.
They spent SO much time on this, and they loved every minute of it!This week's Russianism:
Dave needed some rubbing alcohol for his hearing aid but we haven't seen anything in the stores that we thought might be rubbing alcohol. We asked our pharmacist friend in our English Club group what the Russian name for it was. She didn't know. Dave asked her what they use to sterilize the skin before giving a shot. A couple of class members insisted that vodka could be used. The pharmacist didn't know the name of what is used but wrote the chemical name for it for us. They use hydrogen peroxide to sterilize! We hope we never have to go to a hospital here.
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