Busy Weekend

It has been a busy few days with progress on several projects.

On Friday I printed the plate for the asemic writing book.  It worked much better than I thought it would. Now all I have to do is come up with covers for it.

On Saturday I led a workshop at the NWBA meeting. We made blizzard books based on the new Hedi Kyle book. This is ‘the one I made earlier’ as an example.

And over the weekend I finished the “’Reflections’ book (although not in time for the meeting).

To cover the boards that make up the pages I was going to make gelli prints with semi transparent colours over the top of printouts of dictionary definitions. But I made a discovery. When I smoothed the print on top of the paint I realised that it had taken paint off where the paper surface touched the plate but had left the text behind. This successfully printed off onto another piece of paper. (I’ve since read about the process on the internet but I hadn’t heard about it before). So I decided to make gelli printed text instead.

 I mounted the prints onto equilateral triangles of mount board

 and added mirrors and used a wire edge binding technique to assemble the book structure.

I must admit I’m rather pleased with it.

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.