Category: Book Making

It has been a somewhat mixed fortnight with a bit of this and a bit of that.

My red madder print, that is part of the Half a Yard series is now folded but I felt that as I liked the print and only two prints seemed insufficient usage of a plate I would print two in indigo  for another two books. The indigo and madder prints were comfortable together, as they were frequently used on the same piece of cloth to fashion a design.

I have spent time painting walls and sweeping up leaves which, in the very wet and windy weather have been falling quickly.

 I have however completed the two editions of “Two Yards of Memories”, but the light has been poor for ‘studio’ style images and so I have just taken some photographs from the work bench and here front, back and cover are shown.

I made some cards in indigo ink

I am left with six 12” plates that I used for the ‘Two Yards‘ book which have only been used twice, so I have started to play around with formations in order to create another style of book. There are interesting challenges when faced with a set of anything and there is a need to make something of them. Usually it’s an idea that sets me off, so this is interesting to start from a different position. Time will tell if I get anywhere!

This is an image of the last double page in my notebook – I complete one a year and this is my 28th! I realised that normally by this time of the year I would be wondering if I would run out of pages, but not so this year, there are no exhibition flyers, no artists’ business cards, no holiday photographs, fewer bits cut from magazines and fewer doodles.

It will get better. 

I started these notebooks when I was teaching embroidery and I found that adults were intimidated by the idea of sketchbooks, which an art student would quickly come to terms with. But a notebook where anything and everything could just be stuck into and so information could easily be extracted was not intimidating.

Two weeks ago I set myself the challenge of two yards (1.83m) of memories and decisions had to be made.

My favourite book making papers didn’t come long enough

My etching press will only produce a 0.75m print

A simple concertina of that length would be very floppy.

So I laid out 2 yards on my desk and considered the scale of the problem

I played about with various formats

And settled on this one, 2 yards made up of 7 sections

Drew the correct sizes out ( one piece will be cut into 2 at the end) and began to draw.

Began to construct the plates

And this is the progress that I made, 2 yards of Collagraph plates takes a while!