Books on a Theme: Face to Face

As soon as I finished the Marbling Class, I changed my focus to the next exhibit being hung by my local gallery. The theme is Face to Face and the drop-off day for artwork was this past Monday.  Not much time!  I already had a few of the soft-cover books I had made in North Carolina, but I didn’t really have much that spoke to the theme. I had been thinking about a Dos à Dos book.  Back to back is almost like face to face.  I also was eager to play with some of my “scraps” to upcycle.

Here is what I came up with and was able to finish last week.

The upcycled (fancy way of saying recycled) diskettes were great fun and I had the perfect paper for the yellow one. They are bound with a simple Coptic stitch.

The Dos à dos took a little more thought. I couldn’t decide quit how to cover the middle board.  I could cover it completely with one paper and use the same paper for the front and back covers, but that seemed boring.  I decided I definitely wanted a different, but coordinated, front and back. As I was going through my paper, I found I had three different versions of crane patterns in the Chiyogami.  Problem solved!  I used the blue crane for the front, the white crane for the back and the tan crane for the center board.  Again, I used a simple Coptic stitch binding for the spines.  I was even able to play with the color of the waxed thread: blue for the front and red for the back.  I enjoyed making this and can see myself exploring this format again.

I’m sorry that I didn’t take a better picture of the center board.  Maybe I can drop by the Gallery and take one.

After finishing the crane book, I kept thinking about how to make two books facing each other.  I had seen something like that done in a stab stitch binding, but couldn’t locate it. So I started playing and came up with this.

I started with a piece of mat board I had marbled in blues. I then added two different sized textblocks, one to each end of the board with simple stab stitch patterns.  The covers of the textblocks overlap, but the pages don’t.  Since you usually write with the spine on the left, I made the two books upside down to each other.

As a last hurrah, I took the case for a single floppy disk and put two tiny stab stitched books in it with a tiny pencil. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures, but if I do get down to the gallery, I’ll take some and post them!

Added on 6/15:  Some poor quality pictures of “Just in Case.”

All-in-all, a very busy and productive and FUN week!

A last picture of my items on display at the gallery; just a bit crowded.