The field book opens when you press B. It is held in both gloved hands, open at Crafting, and the first version arrived on September 28 with a page you can read, a card for each recipe and a pencil that moves over the page. Getting the hands right took the rest of that day and part of the next.
The target was a reference picture: two hands holding the book low, thumbs at the lower page corners, nothing in front of the text. The first grip had the right thumb standing up at the edge. The next put the thumbs across the lower corners as mirror images, reaching in toward the middle, and closed the binding, so that looking into the gap between the pages showed the spine’s leather and not the ground through the book.
Then the grip was measured instead of judged by eye. The book’s placement and each hand’s grip were fitted to the reference, and the gloves overlapped it by 86 to 87 percent. The left thumb rests across the leather flap at the page’s edge and the right stands at the fore-edge, so nothing on the page is covered. The right hand was then moved further out toward the edge, in two steps.
What was left was the glove itself. The leather was repainted at four times the detail, in a darker oiled brown with worn tan patches and stitched seams, then again smoother, with a shine on top and thin tan stitching instead of thick cream seams. The leather at the base of each thumb had been sticking out through the thumb, which showed on the book and on every other grip. It now bends with the thumb. The book’s own light was brightened and set to catch the gloves from the upper left.
The pencil was the last rough edge. It trailed a see-through ghost and moved slower than the mouse. It now moves as fast as the mouse and stays solid, and coming back from another window with the book open takes the mouse back, so no second pointer sits beside the pencil.
At the time of the last fitting the one difference left was the glove’s shape: the reference’s gloves are bulkier. The Notes page is still blank.
