Drum Leaf Binding

While I was decorating pages for the accordion books, I used my pan pastels, versamark and poppy stamp and decorated a second sheet of printmaking paper.  I got my dimensions mixed up when I was cutting the paper, though.  I decided that I would not make the resulting pages into an accordion book, but rather try out a drum leaf binding.

This involved pasting the leaves of the pages together around their perimeter.  When the cover was added, the first and last pages where glued in, leaving 1 cm space at the spine.  This allowed the spine to open fully, without putting pressure on the glued pages.  This is similar to the way in which a cover is attached to a child's board book.

Here is my drum leaf binding.

Some New Books

I've been working on some new books lately.  My art journaling group meets once a month and we take turns introducing a new technique or binding form.  Jan VanFleet hosted in June and showed us an interesting way to create pages for an accordion book.

We were given a 30" x 22" sheet of Stonehenge Printmaking paper, which we decorated randomly with acrylic inks, paints or our own choice of medium.  Masking tape was used to save spaces on the pages for text.  By placing the masking tape randomly before we used our inks, we ended up with a unique and interesting placement for the text when our pages were cut up and pasted together.

I made three of these books.  For my first effort I used pan pastels, versamark and a poppy stamp to decorate my pages.  I used mulberry paper to decorate the cover of the book.

Here are some pictures of that experiment:

I used a Maya Angelou poem for my text.

For my next effort I decided to use a different closure for my book.  The original example used ribbons tied in bows on both sides of the cover.  I decided to go for a more traditional look:

I have an old belt made from those suede loops and they make useful closures.  I glued the ribbon inside the back cover and it loops around to close in front.  I decorated these pages with acrylic inks and used masking tape  (my picture seems to have disappeared)  It it very vibrant.  In fact, it looked much better once the pages had been cut down to size than it did in its 30" x 22" size.  I was really thinking (this is a mess, I wonder what I'll do with it)

This is a paste paper cover.  I made this paper more than a year ago and finally found a use for it.  I didn't use masking tape on the interior pages and the ink was so bright that I needed to create my text on separate cardstock and then add it to the book.  This helped to tone down the colour.



I used a large button as my closure and simply wrapped the ribbon around it, to secure the book.

1776 Field Journal

At the end of May, I attended a workshop given by Marlene Pomeroy at her studio in Kitchener.  We were going to recreate a historical binding from 1776.  Marlene had seen this binding in a museum and took the time to study its construction and create a prototype.

The binding uses accordion fold guards for the text blocks and for the fold out map inserts.  The original book contained maps for the troops in 1776. It was a field guide that was issued by the army.

Here is the result of my labours with Marlene:

The book is sewn over cords and has a leather spine and corners.  I used one of her decorative papers (that I thought looked appropriate to the history of the book) to cover the book board.

We used Arches text wove in a cream colour for the text block and the map fold outs.

This foldout was attached to the accordion guard and was folded both horizontally and vertically.  The fold dimensions were staggered so that the folds would not create undue width at the spine of the book.

We just sewed the endpaper to the text block instead of doing a traditional hinged tip in.  My endpaper choice was weak and the thread tore the paper at the top and bottom.  You can see a bit of this at the top of this picture.  Upon reflection, I should have reinforced the fold before sewing to prevent this.  The endpaper on the text block is 1/4" wider than the page and folds over the first page of the text block in the French tip in manner.  It is secured with glue only on the vertical edge of the paper.

This was a two day workshop and even though Marlene had pre-cut the text blocks and map pages, we spent two full days putting the book together.

The leather that I was given was a bit dry and cracked when pasted to the spine.  Luckily, that was at the rear of the book and just gave it a distressed quality that was suitable for this kind of book.

Fabulous Steampunk Video

Here is a fabulous video from YouTube regarding the real definition of steampunk.  I loved it and wanted to share.

congratulations to the author of this video -- well done!!

A.R.T. Lesson 10

This time our challenge was the Guest book.  Once again we were working with a single sheet of paper.  The initial folds were straight forward and following the directions for the cuts was easy enough.  It got a bit complicated after that point.  Once the cuts were made refolding the single sheet required a bit of dexterity and another picture in the book would have been nice.  We were lucky here that our workshop leaders Janice and Pam took pictures along the way and posted them in our gallery.  That gave use and extra reference point.

Anyway, here is the finished product.  I punched two small holes in the accordion spine and used a ribbon to keep the accordion together.  I used some of my definition stamps as content for this book. 

As always, content is the hardest part of the book creation.  I usually find that content drives the style of the book and in this workshop we are working with the style first and the content second.  We are being exposed to a wide variety of styles and without this challenge I don't think that I would be systematically working my way through all that this book has to offer.

Thank you, Janice and Pam.

A.R.T. Lesson 9

The House Book was a two part structure.  The original structure, the "house" portion, was made from a rectangle of card stock.  I used green card stock choosing to go with a play on words to create my "greenhouse".  I used some wrought iron stamps on the exterior of my "greenhouse" to try and give it a glass and iron effect. 

The second part of the book structure was the signature that was added to each of the "door" openings in the house.  In keeping with my greenhouse motif I used handmade paper with plant inclusions.  We used the previously practised Shorts book as the signature.  I used botanical stamps to decorate these pages.

A.R.T. Lesson 8

Once again with the Artists of the Round Table, our challenge from Alisa Golden's Book "Making Handmade Books:100+ Bindings, Structures and Forms" involved creating a book from a single sheet of paper.  This time the books was called a T Cut book.  This was because the several of the folds were cut in a T shape and then the paper was folded into book form.

I wasn't terribly creative with my decoration on this one.  The number of pages brought to mind a counting book so I brought out my stamps and used a number set and a small image set from a calendar stamp set that I have to create this mini counting book.  My great niece was pleased with the result.

The second book was called a Room book because the resulting book looks like a room when it is open. 

I used some Laurel Burch stamps and coloured them in with markers.  The book collapses in at the sides to fold flat.