More fun sewing books

Since I had such a lapse in blogging, there's a bunch of stuff that I've been doing that I've not shown you!  It's making me realize that I've accomplished things in my absence from the blogosphere!

I've mentioned before how much I love Mary Ann Moss and her blog, Dispatch from LA. Mary Ann has a distinctive and whimsical approach to art - I love her loose and fun style.  She's got a bunch of online classes available, which I can highly recommend. A few months ago, she opened up a new one called Stitch-bookery, involving my favorite things: books! Sewing! paper!  I had a great old time, made some fun books and came away with a ton of ideas.

So here's one of the books I made. It was an accordion style book, made from folding a large sheet of paper for the base. 

I started without any purpose or theme. As I started assembling bits for the pages, I found an old calendar page with a bunch of different shapes of eyeglasses on it and I figured it'd be fun to feature them as the unifying page theme.  So, glasses it was. Other than that, I just assembled bits that made me happy and sewed them down.

Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy sewing on paper? That pucketa-pucketa sound is so satisfying.

 

I use leftover pieces of scrapbook paper, vintage items from thrift stores, images cut out of battered old books and magazines, parts of tourist pamphlets...

 

The way the accordion folded created some hidden pockets, just perfect for sliding in a secret page.   

This sort of collage has the same pleasures and dangers of scrap-quilting. Using the scraps is so satisfying -- but it makes you want to save every little thing, and next thing you know you're just a few piles away from an episode of Hoarders.

 

I'm a sucker for anything with old handwriting. And there sure were some strange images on vintage postcards. That old guy scolding those young folks was a postcard about getting married.  Hmm.

I really like to use old music, too.

It made me happy to use some bits from an old shorthand text book. I used to know a bit, from playing with my mom's old shorthand textbooks from her secretarial days, and I even used some shorthand in my law school note-taking days. So it's a pleasant memory -- probably like secret code to most people nowadays.  And note that bizarre postcard on the bottom right, "keep this under your hat." See what I mean about odd postcards?

This book didn't serve any purpose besides being really fun to make -- and I guess that's purpose enough.