Sunday, June 20, 2010

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.

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