Beautiful Books

Went on a quick trip to the coast this past weekend, and in Bellingham, Washington (one of my very favorite cities) at Village Books (one of my very favorite independent bookstores) I picked up a copy of 500 Handmade Books, published by Lark Books.

Loads of inspiration here--I spent a happy evening just drinking tea and leafing through the pages, looking at all the beautiful work by other bookmakers.

Award Season

What riches! Dana, over at Calico Cat Press has awarded me the Arte Y Pico award. Since I recently recieved this award from Judith Heartsong, I won't pass it along again, but many thanks, Dana! This award is much appreciated.

Love Those Rigid German Spines

Well, the bookbinding workshop I attended in Seattle was just fabulous! Elsi, the instructor, was really great, and so very knowledgeable.

Wish I had taken a photo of the class, but I was too working out stitch patterns!

We focused on making northern European medieval-style bindings, which have more rigid supports on the spine area than the medieval Italian-style bindings I have been making. Elsi gave us about ten patterns to choose from for the decorative stitching on the spine. I made this book in class, which is based on a 14th century German account binding:

I used a heavyweight paper for the cover, and made the spine more rigid by adding a piece of thin wood. Traditionally, bookbinders would use leather, wood, or horn for the rigid spine supports. To get the spine design to work out, you have to sew the signitures (groups of pages) to the spine in the proper order, or else you end up with quite a mess.

After I got home, I made a second book, shown here:

A while back I picked up some gorgeous heavyweight Canal paper (made right here in Canada, in Montreal, Quebec). I didn't know what I would use it for at the time, but couldn't resist it. Turned out to be just the thing for this style of book. This time, for the spine I used the same basic stitch, but instead of tying together groups of stitches, I wove groups of stitches together.

Here is another view:

Just to compare, here is a photo of some actual medieval books:

Not the best photo, but if you look carefully at the book on the left, you can see where the stitches have been woven together. It actually took a fearfully long time to do all that weaving, so I think I'll keep my woven book to use for demonstrations (sometimes I get asked to do a little bookbinding "show & tell" for various groups/classes). I am, however, beavering away on my own particular variation of these books, which will appear soon in my Etsy store.

Off to a Workshop

Hurray, hurray, later this week I'm off to attend my first-ever bookbinding workshop! It's at the Seattle Center for Book Arts, and the instructor is Elsi Vassdal Ellis.

The workshop will cover German long and link stitch limp covers (limp covers are the soft, wrap-around leather covers, like the journal from my Etsy shop pictured here:

As Elsi says in the workshop description: "There are two distinct styles of limp structures: the Italian with a more relaxed approach to the stitching and the northern with structured designs employing more rigid supports." I got my ideas for making soft-cover leather journals when I was in Venice, Italy, a few years ago, so my journals are mostly in the "relaxed Italian" style. I'm looking forward to making more northern-style bindings in this workshop.

Also, I have to say, I'm very excited at the prospect of having other bookbinders to talk to! I've actually been quite happy working out how to make books on my own, but sometimes it does feel a bit isolated out here in the wilds of the British Columbia interior. Very beautiful here, but not a lot going on bookbinding-wise.

Arte y Pico Award

So there I was, having a rather lumpish day, when I got word from JudithHeartSong that she was giving me the Arte y Pico award--thanks, Judith!

The rules for this award are:

1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributing to the blogger community, no matter what language.
2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) Each award-winner, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.
4) Award-winners and the one who has given the prize should to show the link to the "Arte y pico"blog , so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) To show these rules.

There are so many lovely, creative blogs out there--how can you even choose? Here are five blogs that inspire me:

Milkmoon: creative in her art and in her life (she also has a blog about "an adventure in childhood", called Dandelion Songs

Sweetwater Designs: The most beautiful handmade beads

Little Paper Bird: A fellow book arts addict :)

Barnacle Goose Paperworks: beautiful paper creations, plus great posts about her life "down under"

Rima: her blog is a work of art in itself, plus all that lovely artwork she makes

There are many other blogs that I love to read, but didn't include because they already have the Arte y Pico award (not surprisingly!): Acornmoon, Middle of Nowhere, Waterrose, Calico Cat Press, and on and on...

Nice, fat journals!

Some of my customers have been asking me to make leather journals with lots of pages, so I did! Here are a couple that I just added to my Etsy store. This one has 320 pages of 50 lb writing/sketch paper:

And this one, with a grey suede cover, has 336 pages of 50 lb writing/sketch paper:

Enough, I think, for a good, solid year's worth of journaling, accounting, of course, for those few odd days when you don't get anything, including journaling, done at all....

Exhibition of Cuban Books & Prints

A while back I did a couple of posts on handprinted books I picked up on a trip to Cuba. (You can see the posts here and here.)



Recently the Gallery at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, Massachusetts, did an exhibition of Cuban books and Prints. If you'd like to see more, check out this link for some photos from the exhibition. Wonderful stuff, especially when you consider the conditions in which the artists are doing their work (well, they do have rum and cigars, which maybe is all you need to get inspired :)


http://redtrilliumpress.com/cuban_print_exhibition