Dreaming Spirals

I’ve been madly making handmade books with all the painted papers I made on LK Ludwig’s course last month.  I love her method of making books as it is easy and doesn’t require lots of accurate measuring or covering board with paper or anything like that.  Or stitching the boards on to the signatures – you just glue them on to tapes that you’ve incorporated into the stitching of the signatures.   Yummy.  Here are some of them:

Look away, Carol, or any other of my book collecting friends!… because these ones use the boards from old books.  But I only used ones which would get thrown away anyway, or put into the recycling bin.  Rescued books…

As well as the painted papers course, I’ve now signed up to LK’s shadows and light journalling course so I’m going to be drawing over the photos you see in the journals.  Or some of them.

The photo below shows four of the books sitting on top of a larger one which I made to focus on leaves and reeds and nature generally.  This bookmaking is getting addictive!

This one is using some leather scraps that I’ve had sitting in a bag for ages.  They make great tapes for attaching the boards.  The book is an old children’s book that was falling apart, which I painted over with black acrylic paint then scratched into to reveal the printed cover underneath.  And I’ve kept the inside pages to print over with my Gocco.

I also had a bit of a play with some paper from my Pogo printer today.  I read somewhere that it was heat activated so I messed around with my craft soldering iron.  I found that by varying the speed with which I drew with it, I could alter the colours it produced.  And by using the side of the tip rather than the tip itself, could vary the width.  Fun! I think I’ll try it on some of the photos I have printed with them to make them more personal.

If you’re a member of QuiltWOW, you’ll notice I have an article in the new June issue, about painting on fabric with acrylic paints. Maggie Grey asked me in the spring to write one, and I was thrilled because her online workshops site, Workshop on the Web is well respected and well known and QuiltWOW is the quilting version of it. As you’ll know if you are a regular reader, I love online workshops!

If you haven’t come across them before, there are free taster issues online which are well worth visiting.

Here is a sneak peek at one of the photos in my article:

I painted lots more fabric that I didn’t use for the article so I might post pics of them in the blog over the next month or two.

I was also honoured to be asked by John Turner, editor of the journal of the NSW Guild of Craft Bookbinders, if he could reprint my tutorial on making concertina books in the journal. Of course I agreed, and he kindly sent me a number of issues of the journal which I’m looking forward to reading.

If you missed the tutorial, which I wrote back in December 2006 and which still gets hits today, here’s the link to it.

Summer always seems to be a busy time with exams and kids’ outdoor activities, so I haven’t had much time for textile stuff. I recently bought some family tree software – other members of my family have done most of the hard work and have got back as far as the 1700s in some cases – but I thought I’d like to have a go myself. The software came with a free month’s subscription to Ancestry so I have been making good use of it while I can, delving into census returns and trying to solve the mystery of missing persons and wrongly transcribed names! I also went on a visit to the Black Country Museum just outside Birmingham where they have a cottage that my great great great grandparents used to live in! More in the next post, when I’ve uploaded my photos!

I meant to blog about this little book I made with my Bind it All just before Christmas.   I even found a title for it in the Drafts folder of Windows Live Writer!   I had a little scrap of the wire spiral binding to use up and just felt like playing, because I haven’t used it much since I bought it and I think a lot of this is because I have to look up the instructions every time I want to make one and it just takes too much time….  Unfortunately I couldn’t work out how to just punch the middle with three holes so it has a couple of empty holes top and bottom.  I suppose I could use these to advantage by threading some decorative yarn or beads through them…  The book is about 3 inches square.

The covers are made using painted matboard which has been textured with tissue paper.   I made this when I was working through  Mary Todd Beam’s book, Celebrate your creative self.  

I filled it with random decorated pages – this is some painted Japanese newspaper that the Gocco machines are packed with and, I think, some patterned paper randomly stencilled with some sequin waste.

This page has been Gocco printed with my medieval woodcut screen.

This one has an angel stamp and a sort of partial repeated print of the Newport streets gocco screen.  An abstract, arty and definitely unrepeatable print!

This week I’ve been having fun with the first lesson of the free online course which Maggie Grey is running for anyone who has bought her book, Textile Translations: Mixed Media.   We had to choose a motif and I had one of these made from a stamp of beach huts so decided to keep to my present theme of houses and make the book in the shape of a house rather than the sort of triangle shape she suggested.  These are all going to be stitched together to form the cover but this is as far as I’ve got so far.

This one will be the back.

And this one will be the middle.

Here is the reverse of one of the cover pages. 

I’ve got to stitch into them next so I hope the gesso and paint don’t break the needle!!!    More anon…

I didn’t make last week’s journal in Sue’s journal making course because it was a wire bound one and I have a Bind it All machine which I thought would do the job adequately.  But I did make this accordian fold one the week before, with envelopes as signatures.   I decided to make it from the remaining house fabric.

I had previous gocco printed some brown envelopes which I bought in Machynllech on holiday.  Some of them I got upside down but because they were put in vertically in this journal it didn’t matter!

The gocco prints are of buildings too, so they fitted in nicely with the theme.  I didn’t have quite enough so I also put this white envelope with a lovely bee stamp which someone sent me a while ago.  I kept it because it looked so nice and I’m glad I did because I’ve finally found a use for it.

We made little journals to go inside the envelopes and, being short of time, I decided to use some of the scraps from the previous house journal to make triangular ones, instead of the larger rectangular ones in Sue’s instructions.

Here they are sitting in their little pockets:

I even got an ATC sized piece out of the scraps and I think it looks great with this altered leaf on top of it!

Groan.  Where do the days fly to?   I finished last week’s journal on Thursday but have only just got round to downloading the pics from my camera.  I went to Bristol on Saturday and saw a cool Gocco exhibition in the Here Gallery – called Even Dwarves Started Small.  The weather was glorious.  I had tea in a fantastic cafe called the Boston Tea Party and was sitting out in the garden at the back.

This week’s journal was a coptic bound one, and I decided to cover the outside boards with some sticky foil stuff which I have.  I then decorated it with various layers to knock back the shine – some black gesso, stamping, 3D painty stuff, more 3D metallic painty stuff and more 3D painty stuff on top of that!!    Very precise today, aren’t I?!

Here is the top ready to be bound:

And the spine all done:

Outside each signature I have used this vellum with flowers on it that I got from Lakeland Limited.  (The journal, by the way, is very small – only about 3″ by 4″).

And this is inside the front cover:

Here it is standing up on my ironing board!

It is quite a different style for me but I enjoyed playing around with the various layers.