Paper grain direction used to mean nothing to me... until last month

I've been binding for maybe 4 years now, mostly hobby stuff out of my garage in Cleveland. Always just grabbed whatever paper was on sale and never really thought about grain. Then I made this batch of journals for a craft fair, like 15 of them, and every single cover warped within 3 days. Someone at the fair told me to check the grain on the text block vs the cover board. Turns out they were perpendicular... no wonder they looked like potato chips. Spent a whole Saturday redoing 6 of them with the grain running the right way. Has anyone else fought this battle? How do you tell grain direction when the package doesn't say?

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rivera.susan14d ago

Wet the back of your hand and press it flat on the paper. The side that curls toward your skin is the cross grain. Takes two seconds and works on most papers, even if the package is blank. For cover board, you can usually see the fibers running one way if you look at the edge under a light. Another trick is to cut a strip about an inch wide and let it hang over the edge of a table. The way it droops is the grain direction. I still keep a notepad on my workbench with grain notes for every paper I buy, saved me from another Saturday like yours.