Home drawing and printing with help from the cats

Drawing from life

Max silhouette (He is on a diet!)

Home printing drying

My workbench helper

Score at the thrift shop!

Found 1950's New Century Dictionary at the thrift shop, $3

Bought it to practice book repair on.  

Two new finishes

Two new book finishes.  One with etched copper cover and the other made with scraps.  Used coptic stitch instructions from Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books. 

New Finish

Expandable cross structure binding

Leather cover, dictionary and nice stationary pages

Additional signatures can be added to the tabs and the covers naturally expand

Book Art Object Book

Several months ago (seems like 2 days ago), I signed up to participate in an international Book Art Challenge at Book Art Object.  My book title is "To See What He Could See".  I have been plugging away at ideas and pulling it together, but didn't have anything that I was totally excited about.  Recently on one of the book blogs I saw photos of a sheet of paper on water and I thought, "What a neat idea!" I live on the water and have thousands of photos with boats and water in them.  I knew I wanted to relate the book to "A sailor went to sea, to see what he could see..." Yesterday was local Farmer's market at the marina so I took my new point and shoot and gathered some images to start putting on paper.

Bubbles in a fountain, how cool is that!

Catching up with January

Posting a few finishes and a couple of photos from Spin-in.  Was too busy having fun to take photos and the light inside the conference room wasn't very good.

January TeaBAG Program

Half circle book

Binding over tapes

View from my Spin-in room

Lots of spinning goodness and lovely friends

Hand spun shawl finished just in time

Hopelessly behind

Leftover Girl Scout Paper

Lovely piece of paste paper

Black on red

Blue on red

Haven't blogged much lately as I keep forgetting to take a camera with me.  One weekend project has been using up paper pulp taking up space in the refrigerator.  I combined natural brown and bleached white to make the mottled paper at top.  It has purple sparkles and red bits left over from a batch with added girl scout goodies.   Rest of the papers are paste papers made with the TeaBAGs last week.  I like the monochrome paste papers, but most of the ladies used lots of colors and they were all great! I can't wait to make some sweet little book covers out of these.  My favorite was lavender base with metallic gold over the top, but it didn't photograph well as it was too reflective. 

Whew! Done!

Baby album

Handmade paper with hydrangea petals

Latest finishes. Two wedding albums.  Major chuffed!

Reverse Butterfly Book

Suminagashi Reverse Butterfly Book

Pull out the strip and remove the page

Back showing accordion structure

Lovely new book thanks to Miss Marie.  She discovered this interesting structure and brought a sample to the last TeaBAG meeting.  I used sumnigashi papers, kozo paper for the pages, watercolor paper for the covers and spine.  The tab strips pull out and the pages come out! Infinite possibilities! 

New book finish and Suminagashi

Two needle coptic and celtic weave

Latest book finish.  Attempted celtic weave from Keith Smith book, #?.   They recommended to start off with only celtic weave at the top and bottom to keep it manageable.  I still had 7 threads and 14 needles going as I worked from the front to the back.  It is nicely tensioned, but I didn't get the weave exactly correct.  The white and dark are supposed to alternate and they are adjacent in a couple of rows. 

Floating ink on water, magic!

This one is full of vintage prints and my block

Sample pages

prints!  Very special!

Two color

Suminagshi workshop

TeaBAG workshop this month was Suminagashi.   Japanese marbling with inks floating on water.  Love this technique and the variety of the results.  Forgot to take photos of all the finished pages.  Some of mine are here.  We had a variety of papers to work with and one of the coolest was brown paper from grocery bags. 

Father's day gift and new book finish with Heidelberg prints

Travel pouch for pills

This is a little Father's day gift for my Beloved.   Like my golf clubs I bought myself for Mother's Day, he bought an equally expensive thing he wanted for his Father's Day present.   I recently found this wonderful fox fabric (Beloved collects foxes, long story) and wanted to make something out of it.   The plan was to find a nice plastic box that would hold daily pill container and a couple of vitamin bottles for travel and make a nice padded cover for it, a'la Vera Bradly.  I couldn't find one the right size, but I did find a nice zippered travel pouch, so added a fabric panel to personalize it.

New Secret Belgian Binding Book

Inside cover with old charts

Heidelberg print!

 Here we have a new SBB book.  This one has some vintage prints that were printed on the Heidelberg press at St. Andrews.   I am apprenticing with Buddy and we made them!!  Yes, we did!  It was so totally awesome!  I was walking on air the rest of the week.  The best part is I get to do it again this week.  A dab of ink goes in, there is whirring and wooshing, paper magically disappears from one stack and appears on the other with pictures!

Easy cut block print

Here is another homemade print.  I have been wanting to carve blocks and print for a long time.  Bought the materials and tools and couldn't bring myself to start.   Saturday morning fresh and determined with half a pot of coffee in me, I sketched a couple of ideas, then carved an easy cut block and printed it with water soluble speedball ink.  All the prints had smudges or thin spots, but still not bad for seat of the pants original sketch and first print!  Most of the prints are going into a book with a more advanced binding.   Stay tuned! 

TeaBAG Book Arts Show

First TeaBAG Show

History of Books

Journals from monthly program

More journals

Interesting bindings

Display cases were perfect

Wonderful Book!

More Great Books

Yesterday was a road trip to Crestview to install the very first Book Arts Show of The Experimental Artists Book Arts Guild (TeaBAG)!  The show went together wonderfully thanks to creative contributions from the group and help from Mary K, Mary R. and Susan helping install the show.