Sketchbook Wednesday? Oh, yeah!

Here is my newest sketchbook.  It is completely empty inside, but soon will be, I hope, crazy with color.  On Memorial Day, my friend Peg came over and we spent the afternoon tearing pages, cutting covers, and gluing endpapers.  We each made a book.  Hers looks a little different, but they are the same size, with lots of the same paper (though not all), and the same binding.  Our goal: to trade back and forth as collaborative art journals where we'll experiment with mixed media techniques that we've been wanting to try, etc.  My goal is to have fun, try new techniques, and use it as a dialogue.  We have agreed that we can add to pages the other has started, if we want.  There is no theme, which is good. I am excited to start this, as I already have a running list of things I want to try......  The first assignment is to do a little work in our own books and then we will trade next week!  I think we'll trade back and forth every couple of weeks until they are full.

I love making books.  I have a surge of bookbinding every year.  I have since I was 19, I think!  I learned some basics when I was in college and I got seriously hooked.  I bought Pauline Johnson's awesome book Creative Bookbinding and there was no looking back.  I used to be super uptight about everything being square and plumb and all that and I think making books got a little too precious to me.  But then I started working at a bookstore, and discovered Keith Smith's amazing books.  Uh, wow?  Yeah.  His books totally rule.  Some folks don't like diagrams, but I love how pared down and technical his books are.  He gives so many options because his books are not full of fluffy full color photos (which I also love, but..) Man, you can use his diagrams for infinite variety.  I also kind of love his text - it's sort of odd, but cool.  Anyhow, it isn't that he encourages you to be all uneven and sloppy - quite the contrary! - but he introduced me to the world of non-adhesive binding.  Glue was my sticking point (ha!), and it just irritated me that I had to glue so much to make a book.  But his bindings made it possible for me to make books that had a minimal amount of glue. Which allowed me to make more books... Books that I can put stuff in - which is way more exciting to me than a blank, perfectly precise book.  Ahhh.

 

Next up: a fun project I've been working on. It has to do with ladies.  100, or so, of them.

Comments

[phil]

I should have been making real stuff with you guys on Sunday instead of hot-braining a Squeezebox hack that went nowhere. Oh well. Your books look great, babe!

[Jenny]

oh yum!! how inspiring! i used to work for a bookbinder and delivered his confections to bergdorfs and book eccentrics in their upper east side apartments. miss the smell of paper and the term "bone folder."