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.

My Jumbly Journals

 

I mentioned recently that I've been in the throes of an obsession a creative path involving the sewing of paper.  I thought I'd show you what I've been up to.  I'm making journals.  Actually, I'm developing my own style of journal I call "Jumbly Journals,  because they are a happy jumble of images and materials and patterns, but still suitable for journaling in or sticking things in or using in all sorts of different ways.  (Some people call this sort of thing "junk journals," but I think that makes them sounds... well, junky.)

I've made books for a long time, but I got enthused in a whole new way when I took an online class from Mary Ann Moss called "Remains of the Day." It opened up my eyes to using a huge variety of fun stuff in one book, and I've been messing around with them ever since.  (In case you are interested, a new session of the class is open for registration right now.)  In any event, I've been fiddling and honing my methods to make them the way I like, and I'm having a blast.

This is the one I finished a few days ago, with a travel theme. 

I don't know why, but it needed these beady things hanging from the side.  They also work as bookmarks.

What's that you say? You'd like to see inside?  Well, here you go.

I like to use a wide assortment of things inside.  Some of my own photographs.  Bits of old calendars. 

I like a mix of old and new stuff.  That "Fountain Paint Pot" page is from a vintage travel souvenir booklet I found at a yard sale.

I've been using bits of maps.  Even the occasional perfect greeting card.

The hardest part, I'm finding, is leaving space -- for writing and sticking photos and memorabilia.  I like to have lots of pockets and flaps that will hold journaling cards and pages.

Here are a few pages from a book I made a while back.  There's no theme, just stuff I thought was fun.  I use the occasional old yearbook photo (from a random old yearbook, again found at a yard sale).

I'll use old copyright-free photos, and bits of the really thrashed children's books I find at the thrift store.

You can tell in this early book I kept forgetting to leave SPACE.  I was having too much fun mixing things in. I think there's a quilterly aspect to this, mixing disparate things and colors and patterns to make something pleasing.

But I love it.  A lot of people who make junk journals glue everything.  Me, I sew.  I like the way it looks and feels to have stitching on the page, and I think I mentioned how much I love the pocka-pocka sound sewing through paper makes.  It's a very happy sound. 

Here's one that I'm finishing now -- it's almost done, I just need to sew the signatures into the cover.  It's on a reading theme. Shhhhh, don't tell anyone.  This is a gift.

I found a great assortment of library-themed scrapbooking paper, and I've had such fun mixing it with other bits and bobs.

I'm in love with the paper that looks like card catalog drawers. I think I need more.  Just because.  To hoard and love.  And maybe use from time to time.

I'm even starting to think about selling these on Etsy.  Do you think they'd sell?  I'm just having so much fun making them that I don't want to stop. 

Paper Trail

So you want to see a peek at what I've been doing lately?

I love playing with paper almost as much as I love playing with fabric.  You might remember that I've made a lot of books in the past (see this, and this for example) and every once in a while the urge hits me again.  I fall under the spell of gorgeous patterned papers and I can't resist.

 

So I have been experimenting and playing with some specific projects in mind.  I spent one afternoon spraying paper with strong coffee to get a vintage effect, and messing about with paints and inks to see if I could make paper look like leather. 

Funny that I'm never drawn to brown fabric, but something about these rich warm brown papers really appeals to me.  And then there is SEWING on paper, which is really fun.  I love the pucka-pucka-pucka sound the needle makes going through paper.  But then, I'm easily amused.

 

And once I get going, it's hard to stop.  (Which explains how I sewed my way through a whole bunch of episodes of "Dance Mom."  I didn't want to stop to change the channel.) 

Can you tell where this is going?  I'm designing as I go, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all ends up myself!  Stay tuned!

In and Out of the Box

I made all sorts of discoveries when I was cleaning my studio this past weekend. I came across this little assemblage box, which I really love.



I made this...gosh, probably 5 years ago. Inside the box is a small accordion book, made from an old bingo card and disk.



It's been sitting up on top of my bookshelves, and had tipped backwards, out of sight. So it was nice to rediscover it.

You all were SO nice about my artist books. Really, I so appreciated your comments. The world doesn't give much attention to artist books, so it's lovely to find people who appreciate them! I got many emails asking me about my book making experiences, how I started and why I stopped making them. I added a short comment, but I wanted to explain more.

Like many of us, I've pretty much always been fascinated with paper and fibers and color and pattern. Back in college -- at which point I had a great part time job in a fabric store -- a friend of mine gave me a rubber stamp of a bolt of fabric. And that led to an obsession with rubber stamps, which I proceeded to collect and use with wild abandon thereafter. For a time, I circulated a 'zine of rubber stamp art called "Yikes!" that was really fun...I'd throw out a theme and people would mail me their stamp art creations, on postcards, on that theme. And I'd lay them out and publish them. It made going to the mailbox a lot of fun.

And that led me to making books. After all, I needed to "contain" my stamp art somehow.

Around that time, we moved back to California and I became a full-time, stay-at-home mom. It was gratifying to be with Caroline at home, but I had a much harder adjustment than I expected I would.... I was in a new community, and the only people I met knew me as Caroline's mom or Roger's wife. It was disorienting, and I was surprised to discover that I had more self-esteem invested in my attorney and independent professional woman identity than I realized.

During this time, I was sliding slowly downhill into a depression and, as corny as it sounds, trying to find myself in my day to day life as wife and mother. Shereen LaPlantz's book Cover to Cover hadn't been out for very long, and a good friend of mine, Becky (a rubber stamping friend in Ohio) suggested that we work through it together and do the lessons and make books which we'd swap. Becky had had the amazing fortune to attend a workshop from Shereen in Florida through some book arts guild, and she couldn't rave enough about how fun and exciting and addictive it was. So, we started collecting supplies and making our novice books.

Somehow, around this time, I happened to find Shereen's address and phone number...and I just about fainted with excitement when I discovered that she was in my *same* area code! Shereen lived in Eureka, California, 4 hours north of me. I was on the phone to her in a shot, and immediately signed up to participate in a 3-year long book making workshop that would require me to travel to her studio twice a year over 3 years for long weekends, and do exercises and homework in between those studio weekends.

I can still remember the excitement of that first workshop weekend. Partly, I will admit, it was the unusual experience of leaving Roger and Caroline (age 3 or so at the time) for a long weekend for nothing but creative fun. The workshop had 12 women in it, all really interesting women with different backgrounds, from all over the country. Shereen's workshop -- an entire floor of her house -- was astonishing and overwhelming. She had cabinets and drawers full of fantastic artist books, some by her, most by other artists, and she encouraged to look through the drawers and handle the books whenever we wanted. She had a whole room full of bookshelves, all of which were filled with books about paper arts and calligraphy and book history and art in general.

And then there was Shereen herself, a lovely, down-to-earth woman with a lot of creative talent, great business sense and a good practical mind, and a wonderful sense of humor.

I made this flower structure on one of those weekends, I believe.



So, for three years I made books and books and books, all different structures and using all different materials. I'd found a new identity: artist. And I loved it. After each workshop weekend (which were heavenly oases of creative bliss) we'd come away with assignments, one of which was a challenge to make an edition of books on some theme or topic. It was always so fun when we returned, 6 months later, and spent the first evening of our workshop trading our books and talking about our processes.

Here's one of my exchange books. called "The Dilemma of the Modern Woman." (Sorry for the fuzzy photos... ) It was presented in a box, which looked like this when opened.



The inside book was a star accordion, and each "page" was a paper-doll, so it stood up to look like this:



Each paper doll reflected a dilemma, with conflicting thoughts on each side of each paper doll. One was "I want to stay home and bake cookies," with "I want to travel the world" on the other side. Another was "My idols are my mother, Donna Reed, and Martha Stewart" opposing "My idols are Hilary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Gloria Steinem."




I actually sold quite a few of those books. I think it struck quite a chord in women of my age.

Toward the end of the three-year period, Shereen, a breast cancer survivor over many years, learned that her cancer had returned and had metastacized in her spine. Her cheer and resiliency was a true marvel, and she continued to teach as much as her health allowed. I went up to Eureka to visit her a few times, and during one of them, I helped her look at slides of artist books for possible inclusion in the book she was working on then, The Art and Craft of Handmade Books. I'll always remember this afternoon with her...we had a great time looking at slides and talking about what made which book successful or not, and why. I learned so much that afternoon.

I was teaching artist book classes at a local art store and through a few other sources, which was fun. I'd never taught anything artistic before, and I was astonished -- in a good way -- at how creative people were -- but also astonished in a shocked and horrified way at how much, um ATTENTION some people needed. I will NEVER forget the day I was teaching a japanese bound book, and I had my dremel drill mounted on a small drill press for students to use to drill holes in the book board and pages... and I turned around JUST IN TIME to stop a woman from trying to put her NEEDLE under the drill... "to make the hole bigger so she could thread it more easily." I kid you not.

Anyway. I was especially exited when I was invited to teach a series of artist book classes at a big art conference. I worked so hard to plan the workshops (knowing I'd be teaching teachers) and making samples to show how the structures I was teaching could be varied...it was a great time and I had lots of fun and I even came home having made a profit.

But once I got home...I was pooped. I just didn't feel like making any books. I figured I was burned out and I just needed to give myself time to get re-energized. But somehow, that feeling never came back. The thought of gearing up to set up new workshops at the art store sounded like drudgery. And meanwhile, I'd volunteered to help make a raffle quilt for Caroline's preschool, and that led me back into a fabric store where I discovered that cotton print fabrics were a lot more interesting than the little calico prints I'd started quilting with in the 1970's. Freddy Moran's House book was brand new, and seeing how she took nontraditional fabrics to put her own twist on traditional quilt structures just thrilled me.

After that, plain old paper seemed so...well, flat.

And I haven't looked back. It was a wonderful chapter in my life...I gained a lot of knowledge, made some great friends, and maybe most importantly, started thinking of myself as an artist. That was a huge thing. Shereen died in 2003, and I miss her tremendously. She had a profound affect on me, and I think about her all the time.

But now I'm wary about mixing my passion and my need to earn income. Luckily, I have work I enjoy that pays well, and I can keep my quilt art just "for me."

And as for the books, I pull them out from time to time and enjoy them. I have fun sharing them with friends, and I always marvel at what amazing works of engineering and creativity they are.

From a past life

When I was cleaning out my office this past weekend, I came across a disk of photos of some of the artist books I've made.

Artist books occupy that same area in the world of bookbinding that art quilts occupy in the quilt world. For those engaged in that arena, it's vast and interesting and valuable because each piece is a work of art. The pieces are exhibited in galleries and sold as art. But there's the traditional view, too, where folks who haven't been exposed to this art form are puzzled. "THAT'S a book?!" I heard that again and again. I came around to saying I made sculptural book art, or paper art sculptures... trying different phrases to help people understand what I did.

Anyway. I used to make artist books and exhibit them and sell them and teach book-making workshops. And I thought I'd share a few pictures of books I made back then:



"City" is a pop-out sort of structure, so that as you open the book, the city unfolds toward you. The cover is made from pages of a telphone books.



I love cityscapes and silhouettes. Here's a 3-layer accordion book, called "Sunrise."



I also used to teach tunnel book workshops. A tunnel book is one where the book accordions toward you to show an inner world...sort of like a collapsible panorama Easter egg!

Here's one called "To the Bridge" which shows the Golden Gate Bridge and SF skyline.



I wish I had a picture of this book closed...it's a mailbox, with a red flag that says "The Mailbox is a Museum"... here's a shot of the inside tunnel.



I used to teach classes in various sewn bindings, too. Here are some sample books with a sewn tape binding. These make great journals.



And, with all my paper scraps, I started making paper quilts that folded up into little boxes.
You can probably guess that it wasn't long after this that I got back into quilting!



If you're interested in learning more about making books, I can highly recommend a book called Cover to Cover, by my dear friend and mentor Shereen LaPlantz. It's beautiful to look at, has clear instructions, and will give you tons and tons if ideas.