Category Archives: artist books and book art

Inspired! By 0 the 1′s Muse of The Week

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Kat’s gorgeous blog, 0 the 1, has really taken off in the past year…she’s made a score of changes to the art, design and layout of the pages, has added regular ‘feature’ type entries, and—as always—slathers the whole thing with scrumptious photographs that have been given what I am really starting to think of as Kat’s signature “Elegant & Quirky” post-processing treatment: dreamy veils of layered colours, mosaics and intriguing juxtapositions, curly elements tucked into the corners, vintage graphics.

The result is a coherent and harmonious blog about being creative, starting a family, making a simple, self-sustaining, joy-filled life, and taking that life for long walks around (sigh!) Italy. She did a guest post about the city of Turin for Poppytalk that was so visually stunning, I ached with unconyeved excitement, a restless giddiness, and wanderlust for weeks.

In her most recent Muse of The Week post, Kat put together a short documentary about Stefania Giuliani, a book maker and typographer with a studio/laboratory called Librare. Librare is in the historical center of the city of Ancona, a seaport on the Adriatic. The sight of two medieval rooms full of Stefania’s gorgeous artist’s books, photographs, and trays full of metal type sorts, makes me jealous as heck! But also I feel so inspired to be able to glimpse into this warm, inviting creative space, and doubly lucky to have an adventurous and artistic friend like Kat, who took the time to put together this inspiring video and generously share it.

Salamat, Kat!

P.S. I sent Kat a mail art booklet—postcards, swatches of fabric, a cd, a bit of embroidery, a bit of everything, really!—some time ago, and here she’s done a post of the thing…including an animation where a smaller booklet of embroidery and writing slips out of a pocket in the bigger booklet. I was going to do my own post on the mail art I sent her, but this sort of leaves me (happily) deflated…I wouldn’t do anything as cool, so better just send you over to read her post on the matter!

animated GIF by Katerina Bona Vora of 0 the 1 (zerotheone)

Jillian Tamaki’s designs for Penguin Threads are available now!

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At last! The new Penguin Threads books with Jillian Tamaki’s embroidered artwork are available for purchase! You can get them at Amazon, and probably every other self-respecting bookstore in the world—they’re Penguin paperbacks, after all.

I just couldn’t resist re-posting these photographs from Jillian Tamaki’s blog…what luscious designs! There’s a marvelous surprise waiting for you on the inside of the book covers, as well…the reverse sides of Jillian’s embroideries! Yes! The Penguin Threads label is living up to its name wonderfully, really giving the craft of embroidery emphasis.

She’s added more in-progress shots from the project, as well…I love this snippet of text from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and so enjoyed seeing the bigger pictures of how the embroideries were worked, complete with absolutely indispensable furry-purry curled up nearby.

detail of embroidered book cover art by Jillian Tamaki

progress shot of embroidered book cover art by Jillian Tamaki

Now here’s my dilemma: I love these cover designs, but don’t care for these particular books!

I’ve read them all, and they’re not really books I need to own copies of. The Secret Garden and Black Beauty are really more young adult fare…sort of on the same shelf with Alcott’s Little Women, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

I’ll just have to drool over the pictures of Tamaki’s fabulous, fabulous work, and maybe take it as a springboard of inspiration for the design of my next journal cover (I’m talking about my own personal journal..my trusty old Twist and Shout has about 50 blank pages left, I just noticed last night…I’m going to need a new journal by the start of 2012, I think.)

If you could see any literary title embroidered and published by Penguin Threads this way, which one would you choose?

Note: Hang on, your favorite title may already be in the works! The next cluster of books to be commissioned by Penguin Threads have been designed and worked by Rachel Sumpter: Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), The Wind in The WIllows (Kenneth Graham) and The Wizard of Oz (Frank L. Baum). Have a look at them on Rachel Sumpter’s Flickr.

via Jillian Tamaki Sketchblog » Blog Archive » Penguin Threads: Available now!.

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The Nightmare :: beating it into submission

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The cover’s almost there…I’ll be working it into the corners, today…

soon, my lovelies, soon…. (cackle)

(oh, and psst! there’s a tutorial for blackwork on paper on my other blog)

and for those embroiderers out there…here’s the Back Side of the Dark Side:

A little something (nothing) everyday

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Finished the embroidery on the back cover of the Moleskine cahier I am working on for the Sketchbook Project 2011. Haven’t decided what to do on the front yet (it will still be blackwork embroidery, but it has to have more oomph than the back cover) though I really should get working on it by tomorrow—there’s not a lot of time to do this!—so I’ll make my choice in the night, and get cracking.

I finished this part of the painted canvas book covering, today, too. It looks a bit Christmassy here, but the real thing is slightly less red, a little more pink/magenta. I tried to kill the saturation a bit in iPhoto (the original doesn’t seem quite so ruddy) but something was up with my exposure/white balance today…I blame it on the low natural light: the sky was heavy with rainclouds all day, and the blue color cast threw everything out of whack.

The Nightmare begins…

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The Nightmare

Image via Wikipedia

I spent this past weekend at a two-day Handmade Christmas craft fair. I always sell out at craft fairs because I don’t make very much to begin with, but what little I do make is well-wrought, one-of-a-kind, and so special that I don’t have to hawk my wares, demonstrate anything, deliver a non-stop sales spiel, or offer bargain deals on things. The sort of folks who buy my stuff know exactly what they want, don’t question the prices, and often come to the annual two-day Marara Christmas craft fair looking for me.

A handbound journal

In between meetings with these particular customers, I spend a lot of time just waiting and watching the rest of the holiday shoppers flow past me like a river. I try to bring something to work on every year (because it looks less awkward than standing at your table with your hands behind your back, smiling at every passerby, or having to converse with lonely people who pretend to be interested in your work when they really just want to tell you about themselves) and this year I took the black cover of my Sketchbook Project 2011 to work on.

I used graph paper as a guide, and pricked all the holes out beforehand with a bookbinder’s awl; then I worked an allover blackwork pattern—reminiscent of buttons now I think on it—in black embroidery floss with a tapestry needle. It was very soothing, repetitive work that made the hours fly by quickly. I wandered off in my own thoughts about Nightmare, and escaped the horror of hearing “Rocking Around The Christmas Tree” 27 times in a day.

It’s a quiet, rich, and serious start on the sketchbook, and I am loving the subtle black-on-black (yet highly tactile) effect on the back cover. No doubt I will continue to work with thread on the front cover, but the monotony of the pattern needs a focal point.

The Sketchbook Project 2011 :: A late start

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The Sketchbook Project: 2011

The best way to get something done is to publicly commit to doing it. And if you had to pay a fee at the start, so much the better…nothing more motivating than the idea that US$45 will vanish into thin air if you don’t fulfill your side of the deal.

So in early November I signed up for The Sketchbook Project. The deadline for posting the sketchbook back to The Brooklyn Art Library is 15 January 2011…and of course they sent the parcel First Class, which means that it didn’t turn up on my end until 3 December.

Which is even better, because I’m less likely to be precious about it, or try to impress anyone—there isn’t time for anything but to dive deep into my creative wells and bring up dripping fistfuls of imagery on my chosen theme.

I have 5 weeks or so to turn my sketchbook into a Nightmare.

So here it is, my $20 Moleskine cahier with black cover. Moleskines are possibly the most overrated, over-hyped examples of notebook mediocrity on the market today. The paper? It’s shite. The binding? Nothing special…it looks like it was made with a sewing machine. That bit of paper “pocket” stuck in the back? Quite useless. But oh, they’re SO popular. Why? People are suckers for a bit of advertising and image styling, I guess.

There is a world of fabulous papers out there—of exceptional quality—for every medium and every kind of treatment. Find the paper that fits your work and enhances it, I say, popular brand or not! As a consumer, stop slavishly teaching yourself to use what manufacturers force upon you, and start demanding that they raise the standards of their products to suit your exacting needs.

a gutted Moleskine cahier

My first duty as a bookbinder was, of course, to gut the notebook…get rid of the offending paper pages, and rip out that flap glued to the back cover…the black cover is non-negotiable—there’s a bar code on it that needs to stay—so I’ll work with that, but I am going to get some good, heavy paper for the pages tomorrow… it won’t have as many leaves as the original cahier, but it’s about quality, not quantity.

I’ll document the work as I go, both here and on The Sketchbook Project site.

The secret flowering of the Italian language

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Haven’t you always wanted to gather those designs together in a way that was both useful as a reference later on, and beautiful to look at? I have always wanted to transfer all those designs into one big book of patterns that I love. Continue reading →