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I have been doing a lot more exploring of the book arts since we moved to Michigan. Part of this is the much-needed therapeutic nature of creativity and part is living near Hollander’s bookbinding shop and school. I will be spending next Saturday and Sunday there taking classes in pop-up element construction and round back spine binding. I am very excited.

So, I figured I should post some more of my past and present projects here.

In terms of both beauty and practicality, one of my favorite book forms is the coptic stitch bound book. The exposed spine with the chain-like coptic stitch is very interesting looking and also practical because it allows the book to be opened and lay completely flat. This fact is apprecaited by journal-writers like myself.

A simple brown and green journal with a botanical theme.

A geologic map was used as the cover paper for this journal. I was also excited when Hollander’s offered me more choices in binding thread colors than just black and natural linen. Not surpising, bright green was my first choice.

Fishing inspired me to bind a series of fish-themed journals using posters of Thai fish I had purchased at a shop in Chiang Mai. I like to have some sort of decoration on the inside pages of the books and cutting out fish from the posters helped me create the feeling of fish swimming from the covers throught the pages of the book. Here is one completed book and the components of one before it was sewn.

Boxes constructed by hand using bookboard and bookcloth are an off-shoot of bookbinding that I have also been enjoying. I made many boxes this year that escaped my grasp as gifts before being photographed, but here are a couple I made for my Thai friends before I visited them in March.

Beetle-themed, of course.

The same principles used in box contruction lend themselves nicely to the creation of small assemblages or “shrines” that can be folded up and stored on a bookshelf. I have been wanting to explore building these for some time now. It took tinkering around and lots of trail and error to get it right, but I managed to modify a basic box construction to produce a layout I was happy with. This particular assemblage will be a “shrine to goats” that I plan to fill with three-dimensional images using the pop-up construction techniques I am learning.

Here is what the box looks like closed. I will post images of the final assemblage once it is completed. I am already gearing up for a few other box assemblages, but, alas, have run out of bookboard. Good thing, since my dissertation proposal is looming (October 11th) and I promised myself I’d get that new genus description submitted this month (Hee hee.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 9:23 am and is filed under Crafts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.