Monthly Archives: July 2012

bookbinding, embroidery and textiles

bijou books: biscuit

DSCF2888

Couldn’t concentrate on bigger projects, yesterday, so I resolved to push everything aside (literally…I always start with an orderly table, but by the end of an afternoon it is so piled up with tools, materials, books, junk, that I end up doing all my work at one little handkerchief-sized corner of the desk) and took a break to make a miniature book. A bijou book, if you like.

A great way to test out new binding techniques and use up small scraps that you’d normally throw away, this miniature book took less than two hours to make.

DSCF2891

On the technical aspects of this binding, I’ve used the instructions in The Penland Book of Handmade Books—Eileen Wallace’s ‘Simplified Binding‘ to be precise—to make this. It’s certainly a quicker way of putting a book together, but I have to say that I don’t have much confidence in the way the covers are attached to the rest of the book…it just doesn’t seem strong enough to me, gluing the covers to spine material and the twill tapes, and then a little bit of extra holding from the endpages. But I am probably being paranoid, and unless the book is massive, this technique should hold it together just fine.

biscuit book

What I really do not like about the Simplified Binding, as it was presented in the Penland Book and as you can see in this biscuit book, is the way the spine fabric is visible on the inside of the covers. Aesthetically speaking, it jars, it looks unfinished, exposed, crude.

Which is fine, and which is why you have to try each technique out for yourself…learn the process, in order to improve the process. While putting this biscuit book together, I could visualize very clearly how to get rid of the problem. I’ve started another miniature book and so far so good, I think the solution is very workable. I’m also sure that what I have had to come up with, myself, is standard practice among professional bookbinders, it makes that much sense! But it’s more fun when I come up with these things on my own…

Show you tomorrow!

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books + poetry, Inspirations, stuff i've made

Natural Born Steppers

Just finished reading Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter‘s The Long Earth…what a fun read! So much fun that I jumped on Picmonkey and made up a few tongue-in-cheek T-shirt designs for the stepping crowd. As the Zen poet on another earth could have said:

“When parallel worlds are upon us…

can fashion be far behind?“



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bookbinding, classes + workshops, Darwin, Australia

Learn to make six different books in 24 hours

Term 3 Introduction to BookBinding

Six different bindings—from the very simple pamphlet to a hardcover case-bound book with ‘made’ endpapers—in just 24 class hours!

Great value for your time and money, the Introduction to Bookbinding class covers six of the most useful binding techniques—often split by other teaching institutions into individual curricula—to give you a firm foundation of skills that, for most students, will be all they’ll ever need to know about the craft. No previous experience necessary, and beginners are most certainly welcome.

By the end of the term, students will have made a small stack of beautiful and diverse journals, and often take home an abiding and passionate love-affair with the craft, as well.

Use your handmade blank book as a personal diary or perhaps a travel journal on your holidays. Record your secret recipes for future generations, or keep an intimate history of your child—from birth to 18th birthday—as a testament of your love. Gather your favorite quotes and poems into one volume. Use it as a sketchbook in which to express those creative ideas, or as a scrapbook for ephemera, clippings, photos.

In an age when most store-bought presents will get thrown out when they lose their novelty, a handmade and personalised book just gets more and more precious over time and with use. While most things become ‘junk’ after a few months, a book filled with years of your handwritten words, fragments of art and snippets of life becomes an ‘heirloom’.

I will provide the paper for all of the books, as well as book board. I always have plenty of extra tools that you can borrow, and often can supply thread and adhesives, as well.

You will need to provide your own fabrics to be used as covering material for each of your books, and any decorative papers you might want to use as endpapers…don’t worry about that now, I’ll explain it in detail on the first day of class.

For a list of the basic bookbinding tool kit that you will need to get together (many of these items are probably already within your home, but the ones you don’t have on hand can be purchased cheaply from Spotlight, or possibly borrowed from me) click on the link to download a PDF:

Basic Bookbinding Kit (PDF)

Introduction to Bookbinding starts on Tuesday, the 7th of August 2012, from 6-9 P.M. and runs for 8 weeks.

For more information, or to enrol, contact the Casuarina Senior College Adult Night Classes office at (08)8920 1200

photo of finished books by my students, via the CSC ANC website

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Darwin, Australia, events

A Viking Funeral

viking funeral 2

A tradition of the Dinah Beach Cruising Yacht Club, the annual Viking Funeral was held last Saturday. Really just an excuse for adults to wear costumes and have yet another big piss-up, what happens at the funeral is that an effigy of a hairy, bearded dead Viking is hoisted aloft by a noisy entourage of beery Viking men, buxom wenches, fire dancers, Scottish bagpipe players in kilts and other strange, not-quite-historically-correct characters, and laid to rest on a dragon-headed barge anchored in shallow water in front of the yacht club.

History buffs and stuffy Scandinavian bores, beware, it’s not meant to be solemn or serious, or accurate. It’s not even meant to be Nordic. The ‘Viking’ inspiration for this event is more Hagar The Horrible than Leif Eriksson…and Hagar is more the mascot of Americans, Brits and Australians than he is of Norsemen. The first funeral took place because a Dinah Beach Club member had died and his rotten boat was on hand for burning. Just a silly party, leave your hemorrhoids and lousy sense of humor at home. ;)

In past years the local archery club—ranged along the banks of the inlet—fired flaming arrows at the petrol-soaked and fireworks-studded barge and (often after quite a lot of misses) one arrow would find its target, and the whole thing would go up in a conflagration worthy of Benares.

This year there was a total fire ban law in place, and although the club had applied for and received a special permit to set fire to the “longship”, the permit was revoked a few minutes before the effigy had been carried to the barge. Disbelief! Two hundred drunken spectators wandered back to the bar in disgust, and the dead Viking was left to float in the dark for a while.

Everyone was, of course, betting on some unofficial pyromaniacs to save the night, and sure enough, the petrol-soaked barge proved an irresistible magnet to some, who took it upon themselves to set it alight. Good on ‘em.

viking funeral 3

viking funeral 5

The rest of the night was spent dancing to a great blues band, standing in line at the bar for half-hour intervals, trying to buy a drink…

or warming themselves by the glow of the plywood barge as it slowly crumbled into a heap of coals on the dark water.
viking funeral 1

viking funeral 4

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amazing people, Inspirations, uber embroiderers

New work by Jazmin Berakha

by Jazmin Berakha

Hold on to your socks, baby…

Jazmin Berakha has just posted photographs of her latest embroidered work. Some breathtaking patterns and colors in these ones.

via JAZMIN BERAKHA‘s tumblr

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books + poetry, Darwin, Australia, Inspirations, life

vandalized fruit and other news…

Untitled

Just playing with my food, again. Sorry, bad joke. But I have to say, there’s something very satisfying about picking up a fruit or vegetable that’s just lying around, and doodling on it with a marker. Have you tried it? I need to do this fruit decoration thing about once a year…here are some old ones:

rotund mango maiden
pears 12

I’ve got work every day this week, filling in for one of the staff, sorry there’s so little substance in my posts lately. I’m just dying for the weekend! Hopefully I can post something new, and more interesting, then.

Oh, and remember that little gem of signage I photographed and posted here, a couple of weeks ago?

alleyway bullion

The restaurant directly behind the turquoise wall—called Go Sushi—had a huge fire a little over a week ago, and here’s what’s left of the sign that I thought was so pretty:

and gone...

Fascinating, the way some little corner of the city can stay the same for 20 years, and then —whoosh!—is gone, overnight. Life, really, I guess it’s called. I wonder how the Chinese backpacker—having his cigarette break out the back in my picture—is, and where he works, now.

They’ll tear the whole thing down soon, and something new will quickly rise in the prime real-estate space; two years from now, nobody will remember there ever was a corrugated iron wall the color of a robin’s egg along this narrow street, or some fancy old-school letters.

Personally I’ve always gone to Takagi’s (or better, that one inside the Casuarina Shopping Center, next to K-Tong’s) over Go Sushi, so I won’t miss it. In the meantime, though, all its grieving fans can go sushi someplace else (I hear they’re restarting it in a different spot.)

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amazing people, bookbinding, books + poetry, Inspirations, stuff i've made

Teratologus, a handmade bestiary

Ammit

“There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, from The Book of Imaginary Beings

The Bestiary. During the middle ages it was the second most popular and purchased book after the Bible. We look back on these collections of fanciful stories and misrepresented creatures, today, and wonder why the aristocrats of those days would spend so much money on what seems to be a very frivolous and unhelpful volume—for, before printing techniques reached Europe, each book had to be copied out and then illustrated by hand,  using goat or sheepskin parchment or calf vellum (because paper was also unknown,) so if you wanted a book…ONE book…you had to be rich enough to afford a herd of animals, as well as pay the monastery for the several years of labor involved in producing that book.

It helps to remember that in those days bestiaries were taken very seriously, as truthful accounts of the creatures of the world, and a wealthy man of position probably felt he had to know more about the world than a common person, so a bestiary in the library was absolutely essential.

Troll

We often feel a strange, out-of-place nostalgia for the days when bestiaries were in their glory, and lament that we were born several centuries too late. In the days of Herodotus or Ibn Battuta, the planet was still a deeply complicated mystery…it was overrun with creatures possessing supernatural abilities, and bizarre, semi-human tribes were said to wander the furthest reaches of the globe. It was jaguar-jungled and river-scored, or else fabulous cities rose up from the deserts like Fabergé constructions of gold and marble, or were hewn from monoliths of stone.

The far reaches of the globe were visited by very few travelers…merchants, sailors, diplomats…whose written or spoken accounts (and yes, of course there must have been a few who could not resist embellishing upon or fabricating wonders with which to amaze the audiences back home) were later interpreted by local artists, who had only a description, their own familiar animals, and their imaginations with which to cobble the new forms together.

Benini

When I met Kris, he had already spent 4 years researching and putting together the beasts from many different bestiaries as well as mythologies: Greek and Roman, Babylonian, Norse, Japanese, Arabic and Indian ones. I bound him a book for his research, and he started the work—a little each night— of illustrating each beast and copying his notes into the book by hand. He continued to discover more bestiaries, and in them more creatures, so that eventually the handbound book that he called Teratologus contained 170 separate entries, and there are 30 more that weren’t included because he ran out of pages.

The finished book is one of our household treasures. Like a photo album of imaginary friends, it doesn’t get shown around much or talked about, yet we cherish it. It is not just a pleasure to look through, for me, but embodies some important qualities of the man who put it together. I love that Kris worked on this project as diligently and seriously as if it had been a paying job, some grander endeavor, or something that would get more public exposure. I love that fantasy and magic and art and Borges’ “useless and out-of-the-way erudition” are among the things that delight him. I love that, for the things that delight him, 7 years of working, a little bit at a time, is not “impractical” or too demanding to sustain.

Grendel

Zaratan

Shojo

from the bibliography

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books + poetry, Inspirations, life, philosophy

Everything in any way beautiful has its beauty of itself, inherent and self-sufficient: praise is no part of it. At any rate, praise does not make something better or worse. This applies even to the popular conception of beauty, as in material things or works of art. So does the truly beautiful need anything beyond itself?…Does an emerald lose its quality if it is not praised?”

—Marcus Aurelius, #20, Book 4 of Meditations

Everything in any way bea…

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