Tag Archives: Handbound

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Fancy wooden journals by Kris

East Timorese man & woman carvings on merbau, with barramundi fish leather spines

Kris has written another book called Out of Census (his fourth! And I’m convinced it’s his best! More about that in the week) and we are throwing the official launch party on the 1st of February at the Darwin Visual Arts Association (although actual copies of the book are going to start circulating tomorrow…he’s sitting across from me, stitching signatures, as I type this!)

The launch will take place alongside an exhibition called “Publish, and Be Damned”, all about the joys, pains, and craziness of self-publishing, and of the world of books in general.  Kris has done a whole bunch of pen and inks that center on the theme of the writer and his muse, and is binding some very one-off journals, as well. A diverse gang of our creative friends will be participating in the show as Kris’ guests…I will try and do something along the lines of bookbinding and printing, too, if I manage to pull myself together in time.

The figures on the covers in the top photo are a traditional man and woman pair of carvings that we bought several of when we were in Dilli, East Timor for 2 months. They are carved from a single thick branch, and when we bought them, they were joined together by a short length of braided raffia. The leather on the spines of both books is tanned barramundi fish skin.

Here are some of the other journals Kris has made for the show:

wooden journals: mandala and dragonfly

Mandala and dragonfly wooden journals (above), made from ipil or merbau (Intsia bijuga).

Above and below: A book bound to fit the shape of a very large pair of oyster shells. Mother of pearl and barramundi spine.

And if you think these are different, well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

via Kris’ post Fancy books.

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bookbinding, paints and pens, stuff i've made

Rocking House Recipes : : a new cover for an old book

 Rocking House Recipes

This handbound book is only 15 years old, though it’s had a lot of use and so it looks older.

I made it when Kris and I moved into a ramshackle fisherman’s house on the beach in El Nido, Palawan. The elevated plywood and bamboo house was so flimsy that it shuddered every time one of the cats jumped from table to floor, it swayed giddily on its hardwood posts during storms, and, once, an entire wall facing the beach popped out while Kris and I were having a romp in bed (turning our bedroom into something like those glass-fronted rooms, open to the street, in Amsterdam’s red light areas…good thing no one was walking down the beach when it happened!)

After this episode we jokingly nicknamed the construction “Rocking House,” after Stevie Ray Vaughn’s song The House is Rockin’…When the house is a’rockin’ don’t bother knockin’

The nickname stuck, because we’ve mostly lived in boats on the water since we left El Nido (and a houseboat doesn’t just rock, it rocks and rolls…and pitches) and it’s come to be the name of our household, more than any individual house we occupy. So when I wanted a title for my household cookbook, Rocking House Recipes was the obvious choice. I made a large book (A4) of 600 pages, using a beautiful white watermarked 25% cotton paper from India, rounded spine and half-leather kidskin binding. I used primed artist’s canvas for the cover panels.

Then I drew in the lines for a busy, messy allover pattern of stylized flowers and fruit, but never got around to painting it. The book gets used almost daily, but the covers have remained in this incredibly ugly state all this time. Annoying. Clearly, I hated the design I’d drawn—which is why I never finished it—but was dragging my feet about sanding it off, re-priming the surface, and starting over.

unfinished cookbook cover (old)

I finally decided it was time to give the book covers a make-over this weekend. I wanted the book’s title to be on the cover, and for the design to be relevant to the book’s purpose and content. What is the point of a cookbook you painstakingly bind by hand, if you are going to put nothing but a meaningless pattern of floral barf on it?

I tried to stick to a very restricted palette of yellow ochre, prussian blue, opaque white for mixing tints, and black for the letters. I couldn’t resist, at the very end, adding tiny cross-hatches of red ochre (on the ham, the tomato, the chilli, the wine bottle) to pull in the reddish brown of the leather binding. I worked with a triple 0 sable pinstripe brush, thinning my paints with a low-viscosity liquefying medium, and made tiny cross-hatch marks to form the shapes…also, I really enjoyed building up the plaid tablecloth pattern this way!

Rocking House Recipes

Rocking House Recipes is more than just my cookbook…it’s my diary, too, of cooking experiments as well as anecdotes from memorable meals in cherished company. I made it to gather all my beloved recipes together in one place. It’s still mostly empty because I don’t use it for new, untried recipes (no matter how nice they sound) copied out of other books and magazines, in the hopes that I will be able to use them someday (I’m very wary of degenerating into an armchair chef, she of the fabulous kitchen and huge collection of gorgeous ‘for-display-purposes-only’ cookbooks…but who serves soggy stir-fries, shriveled hard pork chops or microwave dinners to her family on ‘ordinary’ nights)

In this book are the recipes that I have learned and embraced as my own…the ones that I am confident about, that I feel I have mastered enough to play with, to change and shape as the need arises…also, these are the dishes that we have enjoyed, by ourselves or with friends and family, many, many times over…not just the recipes that I reserve for guests or special occasions, but the ones I make almost daily because the food is so simple and beautiful, and the slow act of preparing it is grounding, and makes my soul sing.

The Basic Principles of Bread
Coq au Vin

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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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bookbinding, embroidery and textiles, stuff i've made, TAST 2012

Week 17 ✂ Wheatear Stitch (TAST 2012)

Wheatear Stitch (TAST 2012)

This week’s stitch was Wheatear Stitch.

I’ve done a small, no-frills sample on a piece of fabric patchwork that is going to become a blank journal’s cover. Not very spectacular, but it gives a nice spot of hand-stitched detail to the otherwise machine-stitched patchwork. The book’s just mocked-up, in these pictures…haven’t turned the patchwork into a case, yet.

Wheatear Stitch (TAST 2012)

- – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂

This small embroidery sample is for Sharon Boggon’s Take a Stitch Tuesday 2012 Challenge

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embroidery and textiles

hmm…marooned in gold?

Great.

What do you do to a painting after you’ve ladled the gold on like a rococo wet dream?

Oh boy, now I’m stuck.
For better, for worse, I think it’s best to leave this journal, while I still can. I could go on trying to improve it for another day, but am afraid I’ll overdo it, and make things worse. More important than knowing how to do something is knowing when to stop. Capitulate.

And sure, I’m calling this journal Lagooned in Gold…why not? Yesterday’s poem ended up influencing how I treated the background, so it may as well christen the book, too. Go ahead, blame everything on Edith Wharton, she can take it.

Sun’s going down. I’m going on deck to see if I can confuse landing aircraft with my journal cover…

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embroidery and textiles

bookbinding : : blackwork on leather

I made a journal yesterday that totally indulged and satisfied my obsessive compulsive idiosyncrasies…using a blackwork pattern drawn onto grid paper to prick holes into the leather journal cover before sewing. It’s a simple limp binding, but preparing and working the cover took up most of the day.
I think this is the reason I also work blackwork embroidery on paper, on wood, on painted canvas, and on Moleskine cahiers—anything but on the grid-marked fabric that it is traditionally worked on: I like the insane, time-consuming, meditative job of making my own grid by hand. :)

120 leaves (240 pages) of heavy (120gsm.) white Tintoretto paper, with a slight felt texture. Acid- and ECF-free. Journal measures 5 1/4″ x 7 1/2″ x 1 3/4″ (135mm x 190mm x 45mm), and the adhesive-free limp binding is designed to accommodate a slight adding-on to the pages such as photos, collaged papers, glued-in ephemera.
This journal, Caramel (no. 906), is in my Madeit and ETSY shops today.

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embroidery and textiles

bookbinding : : pink hippies

Pink hippies is my 904th handbound journal; an original and one of a kind book inspired by pink lillies, Hippeastrum puniceum,…I used to have hundreds growing in my garden in El Nido, Palawan, and they were a favorite subject for my drawings and paintings.

This is a flat back, case-bound book that opens flat at any point. It measures H6 5/8″ x W4 3/4″ x 1 1/2″ (170mm x 120mm x 40mm)

Paper is Edición avorio 110gsm, acid-free, in ivory, unlined. It is a beautiful paper for writing, sketching, drawing, and other dry media. There are 200 leaves (400 pages) so it is a chunky book, but will fit in your shoulder bag. Endpages are handmade paste paper sheets made using old sailing charts.

The cover is of acrylic paints on artist’s canvas. It has been protected with Soluvar artist’s varnish, which waterprooofs it and protects it from stains.

Pink hippies has a stripey handsewn headband in variegated shades of yellow-orange and coral-pink.

Available in my ETSY and Madeit online craft shops.

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embroidery and textiles

handgeweorc : : leading the soul camel home

Camel

It has been five days since I returned to Darwin after a month-long visit with family and friends in Manila, and only today do I feel comfortable with being back home and taking up residence within my old life again.

The first two days were something out of Dante’s Purgatorio…I was using the words ‘lost’ and ‘disoriented’ repeatedly, to describe the way I was feeling. Often these words were accompanied by a strong urge to cry. During the daytime I wanted nothing more than to sleep the time away…sleep as though dead; but at night I would fidget and squirm next to my husband, complaining of restlessness and imaginary discomforts.

“Oh, jet lag!” the modern world would diagnose, and prescribe pills or a bizarre schedule of waking and sleep that involved long walks, alcohol, and caffeine. But jet lag (extreme tiredness and other physical effects felt by a person after a long flight across several time zones) just doesn’t manage to explain away the full range of ‘effects’ experienced by someone who has just traveled, over the space of a few hours, from a Third-World Asian megalopolis like Manila, to the relatively sparsely populated, big empty streets of a small-scale city like Darwin in Australia…with the total time difference comprising a mere hour and a half.

Neither is culture shock (the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes) to blame when, as now, the traveler is having difficulties assimilating the details of her own home environment!

What has really been going on? The way I see it, I was traveling too fast this time, and my soul was left behind. In Singapore, actually.

Life is so short, we must move very slowly.
—Thai proverb

I have hardly ever traveled by plane. This recent Darwin-Manila (and back again) trip has required my first international flights since 1979, when my parents took me, aged 5, to the USA. Otherwise, Kris and I pretty much travel overland on foot or by bicycle…further afield, we go by bus or car; we move between neighbouring islands by row boat, pump boat or ferry, and between neighbouring countries by sailboat. The few times I boarded a small plane for a domestic flight I experienced a confusion and disruption similar to (but only for a few hours…a day, at the most) my recent condition.

In his books, essays and interviews on the subject of modern travel, Alain de Botton explains:

“There used to be time to arrive…time to get used to the idea of being in a place…nowadays, people constantly get to their destinations too quickly…arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.”

My soul arrives at the speed of a camel…(may as well be a camel, then, eh? Why not? A Soul Camel) to which ancient wisdom I would like to add that, according to my grandmother, the Soul—like a small child—is easily lured away from its familiar (hence boring) body by all things new and unexplored…charming little colonial streets, marketplace tchotchkes, the beckoning wonders of a foreign land. What am I saying? I’m saying that when I took the train into the city of Singapore and got off at Bugis Station, my soul took one look at those little shops with marzipan mouldings in pastel colors, and parks full of modern sculptures, and went off to explore the place on its own…taking all of five days to catch up with me in Darwin.

Makes perfect sense. Explains a whole bunch of things that neither jet lag nor culture shock can. Alain de Botton (sort of) concurs…and that’s always a good sign. What is more, my grandmother moved through her life with the purpose and authority of a military commander—looking much less lost, insecure, and confused than a lot of so-called rational and scientific people I have met—so why wouldn’t I take her word over theirs?

What to do till the camel comes home…

Don’t fret, for it will catch up. In the meantime, don’t make too many demands on yourself…accept that you’re not quite arrived yet—not all of you, anyway—so you can’t expect to snap perfectly into your old life like a piece of Lego.

Go slowly, be patient with yourself and others, find activities that you can work on quietly and in solitude.

Activities that ground you, similar to the ones witches recommend after working a major spell or raising a cone of power, are good: gentle housework or manual tasks like sprucing up the pot plants, weeding a patch of garden, doing dishes, folding dry clothes, or an easy craft that you know well and won’t have to think too much about…anything that you can do without having to make big decisions or come up with creative solutions, can help ground you.

Such actions connect you to the physical reality of where you are; they help build mini routines, that in turn help to re-establish the bigger routines that made up your life before you went traveling. Routines are firm shells that enclose and delineate space, so that your soul camel—with its creativity and passion and expressive fluidity—can feel safe to check in, unpack, and then jump on the unmade bed until dinnertime.

I planted one packet of marigold seeds and pruned the basil………I brushed the cat for an hour each day………I did the laundry………I brought my bicycle back up to snuff (replaced two broken spokes and trued the rear wheel, changed one tube, cleaned the gears, removed a troublesome mudguard)………

I started on a journal. I worked slowly. On Tuesday I stitched the paper and wooden covers into a coptic binding. Yesterday I played with a few headband ideas that didn’t work out. No matter. I undid everything and went at it from another direction.

This morning I think my soul camel finally arrived—every hairy, harrumphing inch of it—for I was suddenly vacuum-sucked out of my lethargic and bewildered state, into an absolute frenzy for everything I was doing before I left Oz in early March…embroidery, bookbinding, writing, mail art, visual journal pages, reading, working out, designing things, drawing, gardening…oh my god, I want a finger in all these pies, and a lifetime of plums!

I’m back. We’re back. How’ve you all been? ◊

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