Testing...testing

So the idea was to create a volume of children's stories based on those written by two characters in my novel. I had this wild idea about using one of characters from the children's story a lightening bug as a part of the motif. There was going to be light and a lot of mechanical rigamarol...but can't quite get my head around how to get it started or get it done. Then I found this gorgeous fabric that i wanted to use and thought of going to Plan B to create still the series of children's books as a series of hardcover stab binding. With this in mind, I've been playing around with how I want to put everything together. I was thinking something along the lines of how we put together the signatures....Jenny and Pantea weren't kidding about test pages. I'm sure that I ran through at least a half a cartridge of ink before I got the hang of it.

Whadda Character!

So my original proposal was lacking pizazz... My new book is going to be a folder accordion that features little type buddies.

It's based off of one of Pantea's Typography projects, but made worthwhile thanks to the inspiration of my Lit Pub friends and Katie, who is fighting the in-the-box-thinking book design kids (myself included) tooth and nail to consider other ways of making books. Interesting ways.

I'll have six "characters" - each with a pocket and bio. Additional decisions to come.

And photos. I promise.

Idea...Check.

If I'm being honest, I have not gotten much done on my final 10 books in terms of making straight lines, cutting, etc, but I have made choices! And isn't that half the battle? I was between two ideas for my final set of books. I am going to work with a piece I wrote that consists of a series of smaller prose/poems/something sections called "definitions of what happens after the sun goes down. Here is a rough sketch of how I want the book to turn out:

I want things to fold open and closed, to pop out, a secret illustration and a button or velcro or some other nifty closing device. I also know the paper I want to use, but I need to head back to Utrecht in Towson to get a few more sheets of it. This is what it looks like:

Within the text, there is a lot of sun, fire and warmth, so I thought this would be a great paper to communicate those ideas. The main reason I haven't begun any of the actual construction is that I need to take a ride out to Paper Source in Annapolis. I know they have the exact paper I want to make the base of the front/back covers and spine with, and so far I have only seen it there. The secondary reason is my brother was in town last week from Washington state visiting before his first big deployment (9 months!) with the Navy. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of time. But I don't work in the summer (joy!), so the next couple weeks I can really dedicate a lot of time to this final.

Making progress....

I think Meredith was right about cutting -- the more you do, the better you get! After cutting 20 boards (and only breaking once for lunch), I was really getting the hang of it. I felt more confident knowing how much pressure to apply to the knife and how to make sure my lines were being cut straight.

So far in my final project book making I have covers cut & a lot of brainstorming down. I decided on 8.5 x 7 inch covers. It was probably one of the biggest and easiest decisions to make, but now I have that to work with. I'm betting (hoping) it's all downhill from here, as far as the grunt work goes.
A couple things I've learned and hope it isn't too late in the game now to be useful lessons for others:
1- The start of a ruler is not necessarily the point at which measurement begins.
2- Always withdraw a box cutter blade when you put it down to do something else, even if you are going to come right back to it.
Initially I thought my cutting mat and ruler were a fraction of an inch off from each other. After a lot of puzzlement (yeah, kind of embarrassing) I realized that there is a "0 inch" mark. I'd been measuring from the start of the ruler. I will deal with this mistake as I go, I suppose, because I hope that tiny bit isn't enough to make a difference in the great scheme of things. Will find out! (*Do all of our 10 books need to be exactly the same size? Hmm, then again, who will know...just kidding. A little...)
I also had a could-have-been-very-bad moment with the box cutter and from now on will be putting the blade back in whenever I put it down. I advise everyone do the same!!!
I can't get the text to wrap around images the way I like in Blogger, so I'm putting them at the end of this post.
Happy crafting, everybody!







Image #2, about as straight as it gets with me, the board, & the ruler.









Image #3, a break is needed for my hands to recover after cutting out less than half of my covers.

Before I forget: An awesome book...

Hi all! Just wanted to say thanks for letting me sit in on your class last weekend. I had a great time. It was wonderful to see the beautiful books you've been making, and I can't wait to read about your finals. If you need anyone to bounce ideas off of or to answer questions about sewing or pasting, I'm happy to help. You can email me at meredithpurvis [at] gmail [dot] com!

I also wanted to share this amazing book that a college professor of mine told me about it. It's Anne Carson's latest, and it's published by New Directions. It's called Nox. It's a continuous accordion book in a box. I ordered a copy last night and can't wait to see it in person, but in the meantime, this is a pretty great blog post about it with nice photos of the book:

http://rainingacorns.blogspot.com/2010/06/anne-carsons-nox.html

I was thrilled at the beauty of the form and how well it tied into the subject, but most of all, I was super excited to see a press willing to put that amount of effort into a book--you all know how much work it would be!

Wishing you bookiness and cool breezes!

10 is the magic number

For my book, I will be making 10 little hardcover magic books. The book is called postcards and contains small poems written about the city Prague.

Here are all the pages ready to be folded

Ah, I love the bone folder!

Here are the little magic books all folded

A closer look

Here are the outside pages

After Breaking 5 Needles...

Since I wasn't in class this past Saturday, I had to make the two hard cover books on my own at home. This was a bit of a challenge, particularly the stab bind. I did not have too much trouble putting the hardcover journal together because I had a sheet of directions from Jenny. I got stuck on how to glue the signatures into the cover. I don't think I did that right, but I'll keep practicing! Also, one of my inside covers is a little crooked even though I did work super carefully. I am still happy with how it turned out, and I loved the paper I used and will go buy some more this week!

The stab bind was REALLY difficult for me. I could not find very good directions anywhere on the internet, so I just used Jenny's book as an example and tried to figure out how to do it from that. I do not reccommend this as a process although I learned an awful lot. My covers did not come out quite even, which makes me think that one end should be shorter than the other to allow for the hinge? The worst part of this for me was the sewing! I broke 5 needles trying to complete the spine...and that was all I had, so one of the stitches is incomplete. I vow to buy more needles and finish this when I get it back. I am very excited about the flower details I added to the lower right corner. I fastened them with brads before I glued the board to the paper. The white paper is a little see-through, but I think I am okay with that.

flagaccordionmatcchbookpaintchip...book!

[Photos to come! ... camera cord MIA!]

As soon as I saw Jenny's practice accordion book - with pages that became longer at the back of the book - I knew it would be perfect for a paint chip project. I'd been interested in working with paint chips for a month or so and I thought the color gradient of the chips and the flag-style accordion bind would make a great pair. I brainstormed several concepts: town and country (maybe a gray booklet with high contrast images along with an earthy booklet with country words), old and new, etc., and finally settled on By Sea and By Sky. Finding chips I loved helped me settle on a concept - the yellows especially spoke to me. So on weekend one I had quite an impressive collection of paint chips in my purse. As a side note, it was exciting to see how no two brands are the same - not only in terms of color, but in the style of their chips. Some are long and narrow, others more square; I got one set just because each had a small square cut-away at the bottom that I thought could be interesting in book-making.

The chips I ended up using offered the largest surface area, as well. Since I was cutting each down by increments of about half a centimeter, I went with the taller chips, as opposed to the more strip-y chips. After these decisions were made, it was just a matter of slicing each page to size, embroidering or gluing the content matter on, assembling the book and cleaning up the construction (I relied HEAVILY on Pantea's nail-file tip to make the pages uniform). I also made a matchbook wrap to keep things neat and protected, a button and string embellishment, and colored backsides to each page to hide the paint branding and embroidery guts.

Did I mention...

...how awesome you guys are? Love the posts, love the books I've seen. I'm very very excited to see your proposals!

jo'g

Matter Over Mind

Okay, I knew what I wanted to do. I had it all planned out in my head. Well the concept at least. This as we discussed in class was a lot more complicated when it came to the actual execution. Why? Because of me of course. I had the concept in my head and was determined to bring it to fruition. We were supposed to work on two different types of books, one solely based on images and the other on wordplay. The wordplay I had in my head even before we were halfway through class. Would I present it using the magicbook and how exactly could I make this work. What would I chose as the concept for my imagery. Lately, I've been inclined to metafiction of all types for the novel I've been working on for about forever. Last semester I set up a Facebook page for three of my novel's main characters and for this project, I thought about creating a children's book using only images. Why? Again the call of the character's living and breathing in my head. I thought about Lucinda and Jillian's collaboration for the children's book and decided to try their first foray. Now here is where concept and execution were having issues. I wanted to do something with Japanese creation myths. I ended up brushing up on different stories and a dozen or so different cultures. Most...were alot more complicated and too intricate for the form that I'd finally decided on (magic book). So while the Celtics were slowly losing the lead they'd held for much of the final game, I was ready to pull my hair out trying to figure out how to tell the story that I wanted to tell within the confines of the construct I'd chose without the freedom of even a single vowel to get my point across. In the end, I'm satisfied with what I came up with.

The second book was a stab binding with a soft cover. This one came together with concept and execution alot easier than the first. It was only when I was ready to get everything all bound and ready that my problems came up. Little things. Floss nowhere to be found. Fraying thread that insisted on becoming tangled and knotted and driving me crazy.

Anyway, here's what I came up with. Not too sophisticated but fun after the earlier headache. Just have to remember not to bind myself up with ideas of concept. This took days while the little magic book that I used as a birthday card/giftcard holder for my friend was ready to go in under 15 minutes. LOL.

Pair o' Books, Part 1

The 1st tester for my image book:

The color is washed out because I'm running out of color ink and I had the print quality set to low. Notice the magic book from class, from which I totally copied the layout in InDesign (and it worked nicely! After some tweaks, of course.)

The images are old photos I have from a certain course that has MFA students walking around Baltimore taking pictures of random things. I chose ones I thought were not-so-nice mundane objects (like trash) and vice-versa (streetlamps.)

And another photo from hunting & gathering around the house, neither here nor there but I liked it because it looked messy, though not nearly as much in this photo as it was in real life...ye old (and new) supplies:

my private bookiness

I always forget how much I LIKE making books, once I get rolling. The first hurdle, of course, was coming up with a concept. For a while I thought I would do LAND and SEA, and then I thought I would do LOST and FOUND, but I ended up with WILD and TAME. Which meant I had to find book-form-shapes that would suit. I considered an accordion book, because I like them so much, and briefly considered a flag book (although my flag book from class came out a little wonky), but in the end I went back to the forms I like (so far) best: stab-bound softcover and the magic book.

I started with WILD. For this, I used an older poem of mine because it was making a lot of noise and REALLY wanted to participate. I created a text block in InDesign and printed it on shiny paper for that crepuscular feel, and then I put it together in a stab-bind with fox colors.

THEN I had to figure out what SIZE of magic book. I ended up getting a big sheet of soft paper from Plaza, which folded into a rather large magic book. I thought it would be good for TAME because the design, while quite pretty, seemed like a domestic pretty, not a free-range pretty.

I decided to paint images for the book. I thought about acrylics because they have good lines, but then realized that the blur of watercolors would add to the claustrophobic feeling I get when I think TAME. Deciding what kinds of images to paint took most of an afternoon.

I painted them on 190 # watercolor paper, and then added a tiny bit of precision with my trusty Rotring art pen.

Things I learned:

1) I love playing with paper

2) I have a lot of trouble not getting myself covered with glue

3) My dogs are not as helpful as Courtney's dog

4) Although a stab-bind is really easy to unravel upon error, it gets harder when the thread decides to make itself into a Gordian knot of unspeakable horror.

5) I still love magic books quite a lot but need to practice more with other kinds.

Handmade Book & Book Handbag

*There were several additional paragraphs at the beginning of this post, the product of brain fry & lack of time for editing. If any of you read them while this was saved in drafts, let's just pretend it didn't happen, k? Thanks. :o)

Mount Hope: Grave Thoughts, by Elizabeth Rotchford-Long:

http://www.elizabethrotchfordlong.com/images/book1.jpg

Sorry for the link and not a photo. I read the fine print after the fact and got nervous (see below; not any form, for any reason!)

© 2010 Elizabeth Rotchford-Long & e#design All art presented on this site is the original artwork of Elizabeth Rotchford-Long who holds sole ownership and copyright. Use of any image of any work on this site, in any form, for any reason, without express written consent from the artist is expressly prohibited. The graphics on this page were created by Elizabeth Rotchford-Long who holds sole ownership and complete copyright. Do not copy, save, distribute, reproduce or use in any way without express written permission of the artist.

The shape first caught my eye, though it took a few seconds and the title to realize it’s shaped like tombstones. It looks pretty crafty & difficult, which I’m sure it actually was, but it’s an accordion style book, and I associate accordion style with being, well, more ease than grief. I am aware that this association may be tested and broken in the future, perhaps semi-near future.

In the description of the book’s make-up is “gelatin printing” & “solvent transfers,” neither of which I’m familiar with and certainly aren’t among my craft supplies. But they seem neat, and I have an idea of what they are as I know what gelatin, solvents, and transfers are, so I think I can see where they’re utilized. It’s very nice.

The following isn’t advertised as a book, not in its current form. However it really stuck out to me in Google Images. I’ve never seen this done before and it seems both extremely genius and...something else I can't put my finger on. I think it’s funny because we could argue that this is, in fact, a book. I mean, who knows what’s inside!

*Update: I took this image from another blog (www.trashionista.com) but after visiting the Etsy site where it's actually sold I figure I should share it, too. SpoonFulofChocolate

Trial and Error and Error :D

For my soft cover books, I decided to work with the contrasting ideas of sound and silence. I thought about how I was going to actually execute these for several days before I got down to any real executing. I thought it would be interesting to write about silence and use images to interpret the concept of sound because I wanted to give myself a challenge (foolish!). For silence I wrote 12 images that I thought communicated silence through the moment being described (only 10 made it to the book though). I made the book an accordian because the order that each image is read in doesn't really matter; they can be viewed separately or as a group. I made it tiny, like a secret. I liked to think of the book as being really quiet -- shhhh, silence! So here it is:

With this one, I ran into a problem that I think I will have a lot and that is finding paper that is just right for the inside pages. Regular printer paper is too thin, card stock is too thick. I know other weights exisit, but where can I find them? I wound up gluing two sheets of legal paper together to get the thickness I wanted. Not the most efficient decision, but it did the job.

I knew immediately that I wanted to illustrate the concept of sound -- the one problem? I didn't really know how. Then after reading a book of Carl Sandburg's poetry for my other independent study, I came across the line "look for songs hidden in eggs." I thought that was really cool, and that line was the inspiration for my other book, listen to songs hidden in eggs. I like the idea of songs and music being born. So here it is. Sorry for the tremendous amount of photos. I won't be in class, and I wanted you to see it all because it took a REALLY long time.

So if you can't tell, it's an egg, hatching in a mouth, and the last page continues to fold out as the bird flys away. I hope you can hear the egg cracking and the wings beating and the bird song (that way it fits with my sound/silence idea).

Again, I struggled with the perfect paper and settled on card stock. Although it is a little thick, I wanted this book to be sturdy and the colors to be more vibrant than they are on regular paper. All the images I created in Photoshop and Illustrator. I had the most trouble with the mouths--pen tool to the rescue! For both books I created a lot of practice ones, so that when it came to printing and putting together the real deal I wouldn't have a lot of trouble. Sorry for the long posting. Have a lovely class! Also, I'm a terrible speller, and I am typing on a keyboard that is not mine. Please pardon any mistakes.

A flower pot? A bird's nest? A book!

Like Rafe, I get a little intimidated when I look at artist's books. I tend to have tunnel vision (at times) in the way I work (and write), soft and small is my path. In creativity class, I made a little book that I really loved: it was purple, and I painted the inside pages with water colors.

Later, when I tried to create something larger (for my final), it fell apart, literally. What a bummer. I won't be putting an image of that here.

I think I was drawn to Leijonstedt (she only gave one name--like Madonna) because she is so far beyond the edges of my comfort zone that is both scary and inspiring to see where creativity can take you in book-making. Her work is varied, from the more traditional bound versions of existing texts to scuptural works that push the boundaries of what can be considered a book. All her work seems to be centered in nature, structurally or in terms of her color palette. They all feel connected to earth and time. This is her hand bound version of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf:

I just want to hold this in my hand to know what the texture of that cover feels like. What I liked the most about her work, however, were her sculptured books, particularly Paradise Found.

She doesn't explain exactly what materials she used for this one, but everything seems so textured, soft and moveable. She actually writes a small argument on her site about why this should be considered a book: there are pages with handwriting on them (handwriting!), they are bound within this flower-pot type structure, and they can be enclosed with the binding. I would never (or maybe I shouldn't say never. . .) think to make a book like this, but, WOW, how beautiful! I would love to have this sitting on my coffee table or in my office. I think the experiance of reading this would be so wonderfully -- what's the word? -- kinesthetic? This is the perfect blend of book and artwork, in the way that it could be viewed as both or either. It looks like a garden when it's closed, a nest when it's open -- so many possibilities! Leijonstedt says that she thinks a book can not only be read through its literal pages, but also "from its tactile details and structural function." I would like to think that, as I move forward in the course, I will begin to think more about writing the structure and material of a book, allowing them to be read along with the words inside.

I made a wooden book once. It was not this pretty, but I loved it. I still do.

The problem with being sent off to find someone else's handmade books is that the process becomes the world's deepest rabbit-hole. At the bottom of the rabbit-hole, after much fretting about whether I would ever make books as beautiful as some of the ones I found (not to mention some of the books I've seen from classmates and other folks in the program), I discovered minus + minus and fell just a little bit in love.

Some of Katya Reka's books are just beautiful examples of how to make a book. Others, though, such as the neckbook, dazzled me with their brand new approach to what a book actually IS.

This is the neckbook, which is made of flax paper, typewriter pieces, wire, and thread. It comes in a little round box. I love it.

Meanwhile, Katya also makes hats. Her cloches are a tiny round panorama of lovely, and I want one, even though I am NOT a hat person. Perhaps especially not a cloche person. She makes prints.

I should mention, perhaps, that she is in the process of finishing her MFA in graphic design at Indiana -Bloomington, and that she has held Book Arts Fellowships in Minnesota. I think it's terrific that she makes books that are so lovely and demanding of attention, like this journal, below, which is full of beautiful Cyrillic text and inspired by traditional Ukrainian embroidery.

australian for awesome.

While I've always loved books, I don't think I've always loved artist re-interpretations of them. Even at my very youngest, I think the first strong opinions I held could likely have been about books and their purity. Maybe it's because I'm less imaginative, or maybe it's because I don't have the kind of fine motor coordination that my artistic perfectionist demands, but I love me two solid covers with a stack of clean-cut papers between them -- something that holds up to being used as a pillow or dropped in the bath or pummeled in a beach bag.

Now that my tastes have matured -- I enjoy a variety of vegetables and finally retired that bright blue, lace-collared party dress I insisted on wearing whenever I was out of my uniform -- I am blown away by how artists are reinterpreting one of my greatest friends and passions: the book.

Jonathan Tse (b. 1967)
Portrait of an Australian
Robertson, Qld: J. Tse, 1998
Edition: 6 of 10 copies
Australian Library of Art
State Library of Queensland
ALAAB TSE

Everything about this is wonderful. The best bits of the passport -- the rounded corners, the smooth - almost plastic - almost leather paper, the security patterns that ought to be used as wallpaper -- PLUS child-sized kangaroos, DICTIONARY treatments, and stamps. Whether this is a book about these creatures or only a spread, I definitely want to pick it up and see more.

Anne-Maree Hunter (b. 1965)

Tower of Babel
Newcastle, NSW: Anne-Maree Hunter, 2006
Edition: 3 of 4 copies
Australian Library of Art,
State Library of Queensland
ALAAB HUN

I really gasped when I saw this. I wish I could see it closed, as well, but the composition is -- obviously -- stunning. I've already confessed I lean a bit on the boring side, aesthetically, so it might come as no surprise that fantasy isn't usually my favorite genre, visually... and even though my brain sort of tells me this could be that, my eyeballs just see cities at sunset.