June: Accordion

The intellectual collaboration for June was an accordion book with a narrative theme, specifically documentation of some sort. I chose to visually document a trip I took to India. I knew I wanted to use only image based narration, and immediately a presentation I attended last year came to mind. During the College Book Arts Association meeting in Bloomington at the beginning of this year, I sat in on a talk given by Betsy Davids about palm leaf books she studied in India. These books are heavily illustrated with lots of detailed images all done by hand, scratched into the…

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Standards of Excellence in Boston

The Guild of Book Workers Standards of Excellence this year was held in Boston, Massachusetts at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers. We were conveniently located in the middle of Boston so there was a lot to see and eat. Needless to say it was easy to fill any spare minutes outside of the presentations and the vendor room. However, I will leave out our culinary tour of Boston's great seafood stops and focus on the book related content of the weekend. As we had driven from Bloomington (by way of Niagara Falls and Amherst) we made our way…

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May: Ephemera

May's intellectual collaboration project challenge was to create an artist book having to do with "ephemera." I've seen several at the Lilly Library that either stunned me or just made me wonder why anyone might want to collect such scraps and put them into books. When it comes down to it, ephemeral books reflect the life of the person who collected the fragments. So, I thought it would be appropriate to document my time at the Paper and Book Intensive in Saugatuck, Michigan with this sort of project. I chose to use the blizzard book structure, which I first saw…

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April: National Poetry Month

I'll continue to catch up on posting some earlier projects this month with one that occured in April. In honor of national poetry month, the Spring Leaf Press and Space Paste Press intellectual collaboration for April was a book of poetry. The binding could be traditional or creative but it had to center around poetry. Using the resource that is the Project Gutenberg, I chose to bind William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. These poems were originally illustrated by Blake, however, those original illustrations were left out of this book. This selection of poetry is comprised of two related…

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Stenciling and the Set of 6

I use stenciling as a (sometimes) quick method for decoration in various components of the binding design.  It is generally very successful and allows for clean design and a lot of control for the coloring method of your designs.  However, there are a few things that I have noticed when using stencils and most of these have occurred in one of my attempts at customized endpapers.  These end sheets are part of a set of 6 journals that I was commissioned to make. Every part was customized, starting with the end sheets. A few things that should be kept in…

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