Saturday 23 June 2018

Sewn Boiled Paper Book

If you have read the previous post you know how the following beautiful book pages came to be, this post is all about the sewing and decoration process.
I also noticed that all my pictures turned out way too big for my blog layout so I am reducing the size, hopefully not loosing any of the details.

The following pictures show the holes in the folio (a single page is a folio, a few pages together are a signature) and also in the inner spine of the book cover. I wanted to give the spine a little extra stability and glued an extra piece of sturdy paper inside. I then used a dremel type of handheld drill to make the holes in the cover and in the folios, the watercolour paper is just a little too thick for a needle to go through.




When I make a book I always enjoy the sewing process the most, I think I used a long stitch here, with waxed embroidery thread and added wooden beads on the outside of the spine.







The finished book from the outside, the wood beads on the spine with tied long stitch binding and the closed cover with deckled feature edge. The blue tint on some of the leaves is from red beech leaves. We cut a green beech tree a few years ago and it came back with green and dark red leaves. The red always turns blue, you can try it out with most red berry tea varieties as well. The teabags start out red and turn bluish during drying. I wonder what would happen to paper boiled in red berry tea?





I also made sure that I placed folios next to each other that also had been together during the boiling process because I wanted to have continuity while flipping through the finished book. I will give a few examples here of this continuity.

Two adjacent folios, one mirroring the patters of the other.


Same folios, this time with the deckled cover opened. I took care to place leaves under each deckled cover as well.


The whole folio opened, revealing another mirroring pattern.


The next adjacent folios, the one on the left is the one from the pictures above.


Same thing here, deckled cover opened...



And the full folio inside visible.


This is what I meant by continuity, even though each folio is totally unique they are still connected to each other by the mirrored patterns of their outer covers with their neighbouring folios. 

Here are a few more lovelies...









And now all I have to do is fill this book with some awesome art. And to be honest that is a little scary to think of because I love how the book turned out, what if I mess it up with a drawing? The only think to keep in mind now is that without its intended content the book is still incomplete and unfinished...










Boiling Another Book

Boiling a book, or boiling paper is just a fancy way of saying eco printing. I do not like to use the expression eco printing because even though I have read countless tutorials on it and watched videos about it, there always seem to be an awful lot of ingedients involved (like allum and mordants and such) and I tend to try and go the „easiest“ way possible with as few ingredients as I can get away with. I suppose, having stated I like to go the easy way, you will read on and throw your hands in the air and exclaim that my process is anything but easy and so complicated, but really the only difficult and time consuming bit was planning the layout how I wanted my book to be later and tearing the relatively thick watercolour paper I used.

I started out with a single large sheet of watercolour paper, it is larger than 18“ x 24“ (the size of the green cutting mat underneath). I absolutely love the natural deckled edge of the paper and I wanted to keep it for my book and even make it a key feature. So to have my pages all matching in with this I did not cut my paper, I folded it repeatedly on the same fold and tore it. I need 8 pages for my planned book, so the fist fold is lenghtways, in preparation of then tearing it into 8equal parts.




I will spare you the tedious process, here are my 8 pages with deckled edges.



For the next part the marking lines on the mat came in very handy. I needed to score and fold all my pages according to my diagram below.




This is what it looks like scored and the picture afterwards shows the page folded as planned, featuring the deckled edge.




I also planned out a cover for my pages to be sewn into and to be boiled along with the rest if the book. For that I went into my garden and picked plenty of different leaves and grasses. I then layered the pages as I wanted them, with plant material inside and outside and between and tied it into a nice loose little bundle ready for boiling. I do not have pictures of this process, but I have a picture of the bundle in the pot, simmering happily.


I used ordinary (black) teabags and roibush teabags for my boiling solution. No chemicals or dyes involved this time, I needed to use one of my cooking pots and chemicals would have ruined it for foodstuffs.
The ready package doesn‘t look very impressive draining in my sink...



But the effect when the leaves are removed and the pages opened up is awesome in my opinion. You will just never be able to predict what is going to happen during the dyeing process and will end up with totally unique pieces.







This post is starting to get a little lenghty so I will show the binding process in my next post...


















Thursday 7 June 2018

Tales From The Sketchbook

I think it is time again for a couple more of my heads. In the last few months I made quite a few, ranging from weird and scary to pretty and beneficial. I have also started to expand my drawing and painting techniques into the mixed media area by participating in online self study courses by an artist called Tamara Laporte, her webpage is called willowing.org and she uses (optional) meditations to highlight the good things and influences in your life and let go of the not so beneficial thinking habits and negative influences. 

I would like to start off with a positive girl I made. 


She is about finding “the light within”, the place inside not tainted by social media induced bullshit, the part of you that is not trying to tell you what a horrible and insufficient person you are but the little part that is good and clean. The thought of this place always reminds me of the Tarot card The Star and of having hope. So I would say she is a very positive girl indeed.


Hope Girl is closely related to Transformation Girl. 
Transformation Girl demonstrates what it feels like for me sometimes to try and turn the shit we see in the newspapers, online, the rubbish commercials and globalisation into something understandable and maybe even beneficial for my children. How do we explain to children the wars that are going on, the injustices in society, ethics and morality? Sometimes my kids (probably like all others as well) ask me questions I have no idea how to answer, one was why countries go to war against each other and if a soldier is a good thing, and what soldiers do when they come home. Those are really good questions to ask, a challenge to answer, and so much food for thought.




Then there was a good gap before I made the next girl, I started one other but I did not finish her as of yet. But the Ego- Clown had to come out.


Everybody has one of those, but he might take on different shapes for others. For me this is him, the opposite of the light inside, the part that whispers of anxieties and torture of the consciousness. He is the part of all of us that tells us we are not good enough, can never be good enough or how could anybody ever love such a thing as us? Unfortunately he is very strong, and the phrase “exercising your ego” is entirely accurate here, the more we use the clowns thought patterns, the more we exercise him, the stronger he gets. 
I am not so foolish as to think I could ever get rid of him. We all need our egos, our ego helps us navigate society more or less successfully, we can not do without him. But needing him does not mean he has the right to take liberties with our sanity!


And the last one for today is a positive one, it is inspired by Willowing, but I made it before I took any of her classes, I had just watched a couple of her videos on YouTube. She has a painting “The Happy Traveller”, where she uses an animal we feel drawn to, and since I love to draw and paint Octopuses I went for a mermaidy look. This is very much a mixed media painting using watersoluble crayons, acrylic paints, marker, watercolour marker and gel pens.