Books from Penland #2

"Books have to work!" Bookgirl reminded me of this quote from Penland teacher Laura Wait and it's something I agree with completely. I don't want people to be afraid of my books. They need some visual guidance as to the way into them, the feeling that they're secure and won't fall apart and that they open well. For me books are about curiosity and exploration....you don't want to scare away the visitors!
The third structure we took up at Penland was the drum leaf binding (a structure created by Tim Ely). I had done it once in class with Sara Langworthy (who is a wonderful artist and terrific teacher), but was eager to try it again. It's a particularly elegant book: each page opens flat, but I also love how the book moves in your hand. Laura has done some fabulous books on gardens and I let myself be derivative of that work...the checkerboards and "trees" are similar to her images, but the colors were a surprise to us both! I also felt that the checkerboard "walk" gave the book a narrative, even if it was just an image. It's hard to see in these images, but there is text written into the paint on the bottom about my own garden. The book is 5 1/4 x 5 1/4".











Our final structure was a sewn boards binding with a concertina. We were heading towards our last days together and Laura was clear that none of these bindings were mandatory to do, but I had one more idea and wanted the experience so I dove in. The stitching on this binding is not difficult. What was most challenging for me was folding in the concertina around each section as we sewed (we used Moriki paper from Aiko's). Daniel Kelm is teaching the same structure at Garage Annex this summer and sums up the advantages of this structure very nicely:
"(the) concertina spine is ideal for accommodating the thickness of signatures of pages with fold outs, or material such as a photograph that is collaged onto the surface of the page. Another advantage of the non-adhesive concertina spine structure is that the book can open flat. "
The cover on this is not complete, but here's the interior of the book:














The background is acrylic/wheat paste, as is the rectangle (which is based on the golden ratio). The lines are drawn in acrylic ink with a chopstick and the "seeds" are water pastels. The book is 10"x 4 1/2".