March 18, 2012 · 8:19 am

Well, Almost Finished

Took the books out of the press and here they are:

They all looked really nice until I realized that  the back endpaper in the map book was upside down!  My endpapers rarely have directionality and I never noticed.  Sigh.

Towers are in good shape, well, at least so far.  Haven’t finished the boxes for them yet, but have cut and folded the paper so it’s just folding and gluing them into place.

Here’s a look at the outsides:

You can see them all at the page onMaking Towers.

Some of these books and towers will be for sale in my shop at Etsy, Losing Her Marbles.

 

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March 11, 2012 · 10:56 pm

Finished

Well, I did it.  Finished the four books today and even started on some towers.  Good feeling of accomplishment.  The books are in the press overnight so tomorrow morning will be the final verdict.  There’s always  some trepidation when I take the books out for a final check.  That’s when I spot the bit of glue that somehow wound up on the front cover or I notice that the square isn’t quite right or the endpapers are 1/32 of an inch off line. It is quite difficult to salvage a book that isn’t quite right and impossible if it is a real mess.  Better to chuck it and start over.  Fortunately, it doesn’t happen very often.

Tomorrow I’ll take the final pictures and add more to the various pages – Designing & Making a Book.

 

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March 10, 2012 · 10:18 pm

Catching Up

This week I’ve been working on the four books that I’ve been documenting on the Design and Making a Book step two & step three pages. However, working on the books has meant less time for writing about them. Tonight I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures, but haven’t had time to explain what they are. Will do that tomorrow, I hope.

What fascinates me is how the books change during the process.  I have a picture in my mind of what the finished product will look like, but it seldom is totally accurate.  Materials sometimes seem to have a mind of their own! Papers that I plan on using magically shrink or get cut in the wrong direction forcing me to use alternatives. Sometimes I just don’t like something on the sixth or seventh try.  One of the advantages of working on several pieces at once is that I have time to step away from one choice and come back to it later. Sometimes a paper I am considering for one book, will end up in a totally different place.

The Black Palm book is a good example.  My first thoughts on the endpapers were just wrong.  The second (the tigers) put William Blake into my head and I have been quoting “Tyger!, Tyger!” all week – mainly to myself.  I’m very pleased with the outcome.   I had no plan to use leather on any of these books.  It involves a lot of work to pare it down and I have been preoccupied with a lot of other stuff.  When I was trying to decide what to use as the spine for this book, nothing was working — until I noticed a piece of black leather.  It was just the right size and worked beautifully.  The result is that this is probably my favorite book in the batch and not at all as planned.

 

 

 

 

 

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March 3, 2012 · 10:09 pm

Design vs. Doing

 

If you’ve read my pages on Designing a Book, you’ll know that I’ve started working on a new set of books this week.  The design decisions have almost all been made, so next week I’ll be moving on to the more mechanical aspects of making books – the sewing, the pasting, the cutting. I think the enjoyment I find in creating books, or my towers, comes from the duality of the process.  There’s a lot of thought and creativity that goes into the design phase, but that is followed by rote work.  To do it properly, one has to be careful and precise, but the sewing and pasting doesn’t take much thought.  Attention, yes, but not thought.  I can relax and daydream a bit.  Not too much or the textblock goes into the covers upside down!

It would be boring to just do the making part and it would be frustrating to just design with no product.  Combining design and execution makes a very fulfilling whole.  I’m sure there are hundreds of hobbies and skills that would yield equal satisfaction, but this works for me!

In case you missed them, these are the books I’m currently making.

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February 26, 2012 · 10:52 pm

Back to Work

…. or rather Back to Play.

The past week has been spent with insurance claims, car salesmen, doctors, etc., etc.  It’s a relief to be able to go back to the fun parts.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time designing my next set of books and I’ll be sharing the results here.  I’ve also started a page on How to Design a Book, or at least the way I usually do it. This week I’ve been starting by choosing the outside covers first, but at other times I’ve started with a title, an illustration, endpapers or even the paper I wanted to use as the textblock.  Flexibility is a good thing!

I’ll give you a spoiler here. These are the papers I’ve chosen for my next batch of books.  If you want to see the choices I made, just follow this link.

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February 19, 2012 · 2:22 pm

The Vagaries of Memory

Yesterday I was in a car accident.  While driving down the hill near my house, I hit a patch of ice and ended up in the ditch.  However that’s not what this blog is about. It’s just the starting point.

After the car came to a stop, I have an incredibly vivid memory of looking at the dashboard and seeing the lights on it. That made me realize the engine was still running, so I reached down and switched off the ignition.  In my memory I was sitting up and the car was facing down the hill.  The problem is, that’s not what happened.  Yes, I did see the lights and I did turn off the ignition, but the car was upside down, lying on its roof, with the nose pointing up the hill.

I must have been upside down, held in place by my seat belt and there’s no way I could have seen either up or down the hill as the windshield was collapsed and smashed with the hood of the car lying on the ground.

Over the past 24 hours, I have tried many times to correct my memory by telling my brain what must have happened and the real position of my body.  My memory doesn’t care!  It stubbornly clings to the upright position.  It  fascinates me and raises a whole range of questions about memory under stress. I have always heard that eyewitness accounts can be unreliable.  Now I really understand that.

My armchair opinion is that the brain is trying to make sense of something that is nonsense and totally unfamiliar.  I always drive the car sitting up and I was going down the hill.  Driving a car upside down doesn’t make sense and is a totally new pattern, so the brain improvises and force fits what it sees into what it “should” see.

For the sake of the narrative, I was able to unfasten my seat belt and turn myself around enough to find the door handle.  Miracle of miracles, when I tried the door, it opened as easy as pie and the warning chime (keys in ignition) even went off.  Many thanks to our laws on automotive safety.  And yes, other than the expected bumps and bruises, I seem to be fine.  The car, not so much!

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February 18, 2012 · 6:30 pm

Choices

A friend recently gave me some pieces of papyrus and I am puzzling over what to do with them.  The sheets are heavier than what I use for book covers, but I don’t know if they are strong  or flexible enough to use on my boxes.  It might be interesting to try marbling one sheet, although that could be a bit of a waste as the beauty of the sheets is in the weave-like texture and the natural fibers.  That might be lost under the marbled colors.  What to do?    I think I’ll try one piece as book covers and see how it works.

Next question: what to use for endpapers?  I had some dark blue and gold hieroglyphic paper, but there’s not enough except for a tiny book and I don’t want to order more.  I have some white and gold with an Egyptian motif, but it’s a little too shiny and too over the top for the papyrus.  I think I’ll have to look further.

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February 15, 2012 · 1:46 am

Long Time

Nothing to do with books or boxes, but yesterday I finally finished a project I had started many, many years ago.  I think it was 1979 in fact.

I found it half-finished sometime last year and decided it was time to get to work on it.  Really didn’t think I’d get it done, but Yeah for me!  Closure is good.  Now the next goal is to stretch and frame it.  Don’t hold your breath.

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February 12, 2012 · 5:46 pm

Towers are Fun

Last week I decided to make some more of my Treasure Towers for sale in my shop on Etsy.  I think the part I enjoy the most is picking out the papers to use.  Usually, I start with the outside, but not always.  I find that I prefer to make four boxes at a time even if they are different size.  Doing the same actions “assembly line” fashion just works best.  Not more than four, or I get bored!

But back to choosing.  My first was very uncharacteristic, I didn’t use my own marbled paper.  I had a piece of Italian paper with large butterflies that I wanted to use.  The pattern is really too big for my books.  I had trouble finding papers for the inside since the colors weren’t a good match.  I finally found two papers that had patterns that reminded me of the scales on the wings  of butterflies.  I made the top of the same butterfly pattern as the outside.

The other papers were a bit easier, I knew I wanted to use some maps I’d marbled.  The last tower was a recently marbled sheet that I was excited about.

I have more towers here.  I have a page about making my boxes and towers here or you can click the link at the top of the page that says, ” Boxes & Other Creations”.

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February 10, 2012 · 11:16 pm

February in Black

Last week I was marbling paper again and I was off to a slow start.  Nothing was working right.  Colors were streaking, paints were spotting, worms all over the place –  just a mess.  It took me a day to realize that I had mixed the alum incorrectly and another half day to get everything else into balance.

I pulled some good sheets, but nothing thrilling and a lot that were “book only” – not good enough to sell as full sheets.  As usual, on day three, I switched to a smaller tray to work on card stock for note cards and vintage papers.  I realized that I was getting a very powerful black in the small tray, much stronger than I’d ever had before. I ran with it and pulled the papers shown below.  All of these were done on light colored paper – cream or white.

Enjoy!

The colors become so vivid when contrasted with the black.  Wish I had some large papers like these.

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