Flotsam Tells Her Tale

I posted earlier about drying seaweed so that Flotsam could tell her tale. It took a while to dry--we had misty weather almost immediately after I hung it up--but in the end it did finish, quite nicely, and Flotsam got to tell her tale!

I went back and forth for sometime on the issue of words--you may remember that the original slideshow included text--and in the end decided not to. Instead, I opted for a post-card like look, a series of images Flotsam might have mailed home to friends and relatives. The format leaves people open to tell their own version of her tale.

Ultimately, I also chose somewhat different pictures from those used in the slideshow. They were taken the same day but had different orientations or focuses that worked better for the book.

Watch Out for Whales

I finished the scanned-printed-and-bound version, the one that is *not* fourteen feet long and that can be held in your hands.

I think it turned out well. I was afraid that the texture would be lost in the transition and, while it is true you can no longer touch it, it is still there.

I think next time I make one of these, I'll leave a bit more of a left margin in the original so that it won't be swallowed in the stitching. I was thinking whole-page when I made it, and while the format is still good, I think it's probably possible to make something better, with a stronger balance for both formats.

Still, I'm very happy with it.

I'm made even happier by the fact that this copy was made-to-order copy and will go to its new home on Tuesday.

Building a Book (Stage 1)

Step One: Find a doll washed ashore on the beach.
Step Two: Take lots of pictures.
Step Three: Decide to feature her as part of a Found Object Book. Sort through pictures again.
Step Four: Conclude that seaweed is essential to the process. Bike to the beach and collect some part of a huge mound lying there waiting. Pack it in a plastic bag, inside an old backpack.
Step Five: Hang it on the line to dry. Duck back and forth for things, getting thoroughly seaweedy in the process.
Step Six (optional): Rush off to class, realizing on the way there that the seaweed smell has well and truly stuck. Discover that someone is needed to gallery sit and stay late, still smelling of seaweed.

Still to come: Attempting to make paper with some of the seaweed.

The Reading Room

That was fun!

The reception was this evening from 5-7 PM--at least, officially it ended at 7. People stayed until past 7:30, and that was wonderful.

It was much, much busier than I expected, sometimes quite crowded, and people were really looking at the books, filling the chairs as they read them, or standing by the shelves. It was great!

A couple of people made me very happy by walking out, looking back and saying, "Oh, I didn't see that one!" and reentering.

Thank you to everyone who came!

And if you couldn't make it to the reception, or if you made it but couldn't see everything, it's not too late: The show runs through the 21st.

I took the picture just at the beginning of the show, after that, it got very busy!

You Are Invited II

Did I mention that we're serving food at the reception?


Stop in!

You are Invited

To The Reading Room:


From November 3 through November 21, the Orange Coast College student gallery will be turned into a library. It is full of work by students past and present. Come in, sit down, and page through any or all of over sixty handmade pieces.



Orange Coast College Project Gallery
(located in the OCC Fine Arts Center, Merrimac Rd., next to Starbucks)

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: M,T,W,Th 10am-4pm, T 6-8pm

Setting Up the Show

I've mentioned earlier that Orange Coast College is doing a book arts show featuring books made by students over the last few years.

It's this month, from today til the 21st, and we had quite a bit to do to get ready for it.

First of all, we wanted the books to be accessible to people which meant making a space where the books could both be on display and within reach.

Second, we wanted an inviting place. So, last Tuesday, the class spent several hours browsing through the drama department's collection (everything from "Mouse poison" to "Old fashioned telephones" and man-eating plants was available on the shelves--I would have loved to stay longer just looking at the labels) and carrying our finds over to the room. There are some lovely pieces there now, an old-fashioned couch, a chaise lounge, some comfortable chairs, just waiting for people to come in and sit down.

Bookshelves proved to be in short supply, so several of us ended up coming back on Sunday to bring and/or set up shelves and an additional supply of tables, rugs, and plants (Guess who brought those last?). We spent a lot of time studying the room, carrying shelves back and forth and re-arranging the rugs to get the look we wanted.

It also took a while figuring out how to display some of the pieces. My own contribution is, I finally realized, thirteen feet long and *not* the easiest to find shelf space for when it is fully displayed. Someone else made a lovely book with images from Hawaian quilts--one I still need to look at in greater detail, the images are so complex--and an accompanying smaller book that needed extra

care. A small portion had to go behind glass.

The final results are, I think, well worth the time it took. I do hope plenty of people can come to the opening on Thursday night.


Pictures: Courtney, Kim, and Keri carefully hanging a piece; Keri arranging the tea things opposite an altered Alice in Wonderland book, me taking advantage of the chance to sit down and look at one of the books.

No Books Were Harmed in the Making of This Post

I've spent the last month working on "Watch Out for Whales," a rhyme book illustrated with collage images. It started out to be a stab stitch book and ended up an accordion book because I got to liking the bright illustrations and thought they looked well spread out on the table.I've had a lot of fun and, of course, some frustration. The fun is obvious: What's not to like about painting, cutting, and gluing?

The frustration? Well, gluing doesn't *always* work as well as one would like. I've had a hard time getting the back and front to lie flat together against the joining ribbons. I've been working on is an accordion book & a fairly big one. I've been saying all along that what I really need is somewhere to spread it out flat, but I just didn't have one. Today, by co-opting the kitchen table, four tray tables, and about half the books on that shelf you see back there--the entire gardening section, several phonebooks, most of the hardcover science fiction and fantasy, numerous mysteries, plus a few "assorted," and by taking up the entire room, I managed.

I think it worked, too, and just in time, as the book goes off to the show tomorrow. There, I am afraid, it will have to go on the "Do Not Touch" shelf. I wanted people to be able to handle it, but with so many layers of paper involved, the glue just doesn't dry quite fast enough and I do not think I quite trust it in people's hands. Not yet, anyway.

This is also the anxious mama speaking: The other two books I have in the show, stab stitch books I do want people to hold, are older and I've had the chance to let go a bit. "Whales" is still new, still my baby, unsupplanted as yet by other projects.

Oh: And thanks to the careful use of the paintbrush and miles of wax paper, no books were harmed in the process. Everyone is back on the shelves and glue-free. In fact, the books may be better off than they were before: I dusted them a bit as I took them down and put them back.

Collage Madness

I'm now taking the second semester of the book arts class I began in the summer.

It's driving me crazy!

It's a good kind of crazy, but it's crazy all the same.

I've always been interested in art, but in the past, my crazes have been smaller and more confined.

It's only been relatively recently that I discovered that there were things I wanted to say that I could not say with words. Photography became more and more important to me, more and more of a way of communicating with the world around me.

Then I took the book arts class and discovered that I wanted more.

First there was the sheer joy of making paste paper--something I hope to learn more about, since I've barely scratched the surface.

Then there was collage.

I did very little with it last semester; both of the books I made were photography books, and I am happy with them.

This semester, however, I find myself combining my interests, mixing words, photographs, and paper into a single unit. In other words, I've discovered collage, a form many of you are familiar with but which I had not worked in since, well, I can't remember when.

I've spread the floor over with paste paper, gotten gloriously gluey, grumbled as I overcut with the exacto knife (a new tool to me, by the way), and generally been busily, happily, confusedly, maddeningly occupied.

You can see from the included images--photos, by the way, since scanning would involve removing the originals from under their weighted barriers--where both interest and frustration lie.


Interest: It's fun. I can illustrate my words! I can combine mediums. I can do this.

Frustration: I still overcut. I didn't think to measure the pages next to each other when I made them, so I don't know how well the oceans are really going to match up in the end. Glue and I do not always get along (though I just opened a new jar today and it is working much better than the older jar was). The pages are stiff and unwieldy and so I'll have to scan and print them before I can bind them. This last is not, in and of itself, an insurmountable problem, but I have yet to figure out how to photo-adjust the images once they are scanned so that they look their best and still look like they belong to one another.

Overall, I am happy with the work, glad to have the rhyme not only written but illustrated, alive in a way I could not have seen it before. But, there is always the "but"!

Adventure. Madness.

Advice?

The Broken Hourglass / Book Arts

So, as I mentioned earlier, I am writing for The Broken Hourglass now, and still really excited about it. I'm also working on a quest that involves characters someone else came up with, which means I need to pay close attention to how they talk and act in order to stay true to the established personalities.

And that means I have to read and reread their conversations frequently. And that means printouts (since, believe it or not, I am not always near a computer). They get kind of tattered and torn as I carry them around, so I finally thought, "Well, am I taking a class on making books or am I taking a class on making books?"

And, since anything doing is worth over doing, I cut and covered some nice, stiff cardboard to be the covers and made the above books.

Of course, I also made a lot of mistakes--should've scored the covers before binding them, for example, and bound them more loosely, and glue and I still have a long way to go before being friends, but overall, I'm still quite pleased with the results, even though I don't have red ink and an inkpad with the words "top secret" or anything similarly melodramatic to mark them with.

Now, though, I need to figure out how to unravel the bit I'm working on. The player has to speak to at least four different people, but might end up doing so in any order. It's complicating the conversations.

So, time to get back to work.

Paper Making and Painting with Bleach

Well, since I last wrote about the book making class, we've made paper and painted with bleach.

Making paper was something I've wanted to try for a while and it turned out to be tremendous fun. Now, I have several sheets of paper lying on the floor in my sister's room (she's away for the moment) with a fan on them to help finish the drying process. I have also added a deckle to the List of Things I Desperately Desire, even though the original reason I've not tried homemade paper remains: It takes room. One needs space for big, splashy tubs full of paper pulp and a large, flat area on which to dry the sheets when they come out. Still and all, I want to do it again.

Painting with bleach was not such a big hit with me. To begin with, it's bleach. It smells. Then, too, once the paper has been marked with bleach, it's been marked: There's no erasing crooked lines or undesired dots. It isn't that beauty is impossible, several of my classmates produced quite beautiful works, it's that I, personally, dislike it. So far, it's the only process we've tried that I will not be repeating.

In any case, I'm adding book making to my list of Things Everyone Should Try at least once. It's fun, creative, and relaxing.

*In case you're curious, I also think everyone should be given a camera and sent out to look at the world. I think they'd be much happier for it.

Paste Paper

I'm finally taking that Book Arts class I've been eyeing for the last several years.

The room smells of pastels and paste and paper and we all have bags full of scissors, crayons, colored pencils, and an assortment of other Grown Up art materials.

There's a little time for lecture, some time for demonstration, and a long spell of quite happily making stuff.

We've made books from single sheets of paper, several folds, and one cut, books from boxes, and accordion books. This week the focus is on paper, so today we learned paste paper painting, which is a sort of grown up version of finger painting, very messy, and a lot of fun. Tomorrow we'll make paper and bleach already made colored paper.

Oh, and I own an awl now. I've always wanted to own an awl.