My sister wants to do an art journal exchange with her friend, so I started binding some watercolor paper into signatures.  I got some books on bookbinding, so I started reading them to pick up pointers.  Previously, I had just been doing everything by looking at books and puzzling out how they were made.

What I’ve learned is that I was doing everything completly wrong.  For one, you’re supposed to lace the linen tape on a frame, and sew the signatures immoblie on top of one another.  I don’t have one of these, I just hold it in my hands.  You’re also supposed to have a piecing block to lay the paper over when you poke holes in the back for threading. I just put one signature inside another and poke the holes through both.

This is also the first time I’ve used the tapes.  On my other books, I pasted the outer pages directly to the cover. They also suggest using wheat paste, which I may try next. I’ve been using white glue mixed with water, and had good enough results.

I guess the lesson is: don’t try to reinvent the wheel. 

For the past year or so, collage has fascinated me.  It’s a completely different direction from my usual art.  Altered books especially interest me, because it’s 3D art and because it’s recycled. 

It does take some courage to actually destroy a book, but I consoled myself in that there were other copies for sale at the Goodwill.

The first picture is the cover, to which I added cutouts from scrapbooking paper, found objects, and gilded embellishments that I made out of fimo. It also has a textured wash of acrylic over it.

The second is of windows cut in a block of pages. I’m going to put something really cool in there, as soon as I can think of something.

The third is a digitally altered photograph, and a heat transfer of the same photo. The blue glow is from interference paints.  I sewed the beads on to add 3d texture and to make it slightly more modest.

The card in the fourth image is from a deck of cards, either French or German, I can’t remember.  The red crow on the right is a gum arabic transfer of the photocopy, which I took of a sketch I made. The sketches on the right side are done in ink and layered over with tissue paper.

The orange page with the poem is a piece I did in response to frustration about a rejection letter.

The last page doesn’t show the folded pages very well, but you can see the layered cutaway images of the trees.  I don’t like using premade scrapbooking supplies, but I was away from my studio.

There are other pages altered in this book, but I’m not as fond of them.

My sister sent back my art journal, and now I have to think of the next page.  I have a tenative idea, but haven’t started yet.  Here’s the page that I did a year ago today.

I went to First Friday downtown last night to peddle mehindi.  It was successful in that Windy was good company and the atmosphere was relaxing, but not successful in that I didn’t convince many people to get henna done.  Also, I’d brought a lantern, but the children must have left it on all night because the battery was completely dead.  Hence, I could barely see what I was doing.

Today I have lots and lots of henna leftover, so I did designs on my daughters’ backs.  They have no patience. They smeared them in ten minutes and pestered me with ‘is it done yet?’ after twenty.  I just gave them a palette knife to scrape the henna off.  The design won’t last very long, but that’s not really the point.  The point for me is that I get to do something larger and more elaborate, and the point for them is that mommy pays attention to them.

I was experimenting with a new recipe tonight and wanted to test it out on my arm.  My first problem was that the goop was too thin, so I had to add more powder.  I worried that the henna had indigo in it again, because it was bright green, but it didn’t.  It’s just fresh.

I don’t think this design will turn out very dark. I had to scrape it off after an hour because my skin was itching.  I thought maybe it was lemon juice in tiny cuts, but it was hurting all over, not just in one or two places.  The culprit is the mustard seed oil.  They didn’t have eucalyptus oil for sale at the Indian Grocery, and I didn’t want to think that I drove five miles out of my way for nothing, so I got mustard oil.  I’ve heard it’s a good mordant for henna, but that it can be harsh on the skin.  They got that right.  Next time I’ll stick with olive oil.