Monday, November 17, 2014

Style

I am not one of those people who can use style to keep life fuss-free. My coworker is.
Exhibit A: She announced her wedding date a week in advance.
So, I wanted to make something that would suit her (or my impression of her) in a very short amount of time.

The morning of the wedding came and her book was on my desk ready to be wrapped.
And I spilled coffee all over it.

In Greece, this is actually a good luck sign (brings money to the union) but in my personal culture there was no way I could give her a sodden book.
Besides, it wasn't her style anyway. The two quick books I made in record time were. Since time was short, the binding was kept simple-3 hole binding modified to give a closing tie.

but I added some style with hand-rounded corners (my first successful ones I may add) and embroidery on the cover

this is her favorite clothes color combination-she pulls it off. yes, for lack of anything else, I hand-drew the patterns on these covers

grid paper insides and the inside of the embroidery

Monday, September 1, 2014

Wine Colored Mountains


More wedding presents-heh. These covers are different kinds of fancy paper that were all dyed in the same wine (leftover). The different kinds of paper soaked in the wine differently creating very different colors. Natural tearing creates a cragged mountain like edge which layered up creates the above. The back cover was also wine dyed. The base of the front was a printmaker's blue ink and the whole thing is sealed in homemade modge podge. I, of course, bound it with a zig zag coptic binding.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Maps-Making your own wall art

I make no secret of the fact that I move. A lot. Via airlines. This means that all your belongings for living somewhere for a year must fit in exactly one suitcase of 20kg and one carry on. I can't afford to ship my belongings and I don't actually know how long I'll be where I'm moving.

That means things like wall art are really low priority. I can slip one or two posters in there but otherwise I face stark (usually) white walls bearing down on me.

So as an after work creative activity my first months in Greece, I spent my time drawing maps. Since I'm me, they are actually set to a Mercator projection and have mostly accurate coastlines. I chose to do Cuba, Spain, and the United States-the three pillars of my heritage.




The base is a black lined fine art pen with water soluble colored pen delineating the political boundaries. Along all the water boundaries are fine blue short lines. Land boundaries are done in brown. I think this lends the maps a subtle dimension. Cuba got mountains but the inaccuracy of them bothered me so Spain and the USA had to go without. Very fine pen was used to write city names approximately where they are in reality. The size was in reality constricted by the size of my paper (A5 pad of sketch paper) so they're really not in scale. If I was living somewhere permanently (or more permanently than a single year) I'd think about framing them with wood and glass but as a temporary 'framing' the edges of the paper are colored.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Peacocks and Music

 The cover is triple layered to create a dimensional effect to the peacocks (the blue is a lower layer). The background is tea stained and the rest hand inked. This was a wedding present so it takes its cue from the theme. Both the groom and bride are musicians so I thought it was an appropriate poem.
 This is a rare closed spine book for me. It's 3 3 signature bindings set into the same spine but I set one of them (the green one) upside down to really overlap the bindings.
The interior pages are quality paper and the end papers are the rest of the poem by O'Shaughnessy.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Elbow Patches

This is one of my favorite sweaters. It started out rather like a granny sweater but it has been improved with a new set of mismatched buttons and upon the elbows...dala horses. Cut out of dressmaker's felt and embroidered to mimic the typical mane, saddle, and bridle decoration, they are were then stitched on (checking with the sweater on to make sure they're in the correct place). They have survived for two years and several washes so I can attest that it's a pretty durable but quirky change.