Baker’s Dozen Completed

Just before Christmas I spotted a call for entry for the Liverpool Book Fair. They are running an exhibition at the Liverpool library alongside the book fair. The theme of the exhibition is Frankenstein (the book is 200 years old in 2018). I started playing with ideas, one of which meant constructing interlocking spirals. Though I’d never used it before I thought about using a wire edged binding to make up sections of the spirals.

I was short of a book for my ‘baker’s dozen’ challenge and thought exploring this construction might kill two birds with one stone. I made gelli prints using circles, rectangles and triangles as a starting point for the motifs and using the three process colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) plus white to keep the colour scheme simple.

This week I cut 24 ‘pages’, attached the wire edging and started to assemble them

 I started using embroidery thread which looked ok but half way through, when I was seeing how many different ways I could fold the books, I realised the knots were coming undone.

So I had a go with thin copper wire. This was more secure and I like the look of it better.

 I made four sets of 6 pages...

 then combined these into two sets of 12 (though I may separate one of these back into two again).

These books don’t have a front and back cover so I decided that they needed a box to protect them.

Then later in the week I went to HBP and printed up the type I’d set before the holidays.

Each one looks unbalanced as single prints but they are designed to be cut down and made into a small book. It seems an appropriate way of presenting the text (which is a quote from Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge).

So now last year’s challenges are completed (more or less),  the Christmas decorations are packed away and it’s time to move on into the New Year and see what that brings.