I wanted the edge of this bowl to be fluted like the petals of a lotus, but it spun out of kilter while I was flaring it out.  It will still work for floating roses in, assuming I get some roses on my new bushes.

For the cover of this book I used some Chinese brocade, and the beading from my daughter’s shoe, which we got at Target. (I hope she’s learned that if you leave your shoes outside and they get ruined, mommy will cut them apart and use them for art.)  After I cut and pasted the different cloth scraps, I found that the edges were coming up, so I stitched over the whole thing wiht turquoise to coordinate the colors and help keep the fabric down.  I also found that the cloth I used was too small, so I ended up sewing on more cloth to the front and back.  The fatquarters were bound in the brown satin ribbon, and I thought the ribbon was the perfect cover for the bookmark.  The bead on the end is a glass bead I made in lampworking class.

One problem I had with this book is that the edges of the satin kept getting frayed.  That happened with another book I made, and I didn’t have a way to solve it.  But for Christmas I got a heat gun…I was lucky that the fabric wasn’t real silk, or it wouldn’t have worked, but the heat gun melted all those frayed bits perfectly.

I just finished two new books, and I’ve used up all the signatures I made so it’s time to sew some more. 

To make the cover of this book, I started with a piece of green and black calico.  I collaged a painted layer of paper towel over that. You can see the holey-honeycomb texture in the corner. After that was dry, I pasted the gold art paper over where the spine would go.  I used a rubber stamp with latin writing over the papers, and poured gold embossing powder over it.  The embossing powder didn’t coat perfectly, but I like the look anyway.  After that was dry, I sewed the silk oak leaves on.  The acorn is a low fired clay bead that I made from a pressmold I made from a real acorn several years ago.

I showed the end papers in this post, because it’s such a pain to paste in endpapers that I didn’t want my efforts to go unrecognized.  It makes a difference to have endpapers that match the motif of the book’s cover; I just don’t like how fussy the measuring is.

The cloth for this book was a piece of indigo batik cloth that I bought in Japan.  I had just enough for a baby’s bath yukata, and when my babies grew out of it, I saved the cloth.  The transparent rainbow embroidered overlay is something I picked up in the scrap bin at Jo Ann’s, and the turquoise circle was a piece of jewelry that I found inside a jacket I bought at a used clothing store.  On the spine are beads, stone dyed to look like turquoise, and fired porcelain with cobalt.  It’s not visible in this picture, but there are smears of blue and yellow mica pigments embedded in the fabric.

 This book is approx. 3″ x 4″ x 1/2″.

This is a book I made for Jeff Vandermeer, one of my Clarion teachers.  Like the others, it’s approx. 3″ x 4″x 1/2″. I wanted something a little surreal, a little weird, and the sort of Victorian-era artwork makes it slightly steampunk.    Originally the cover was meant to have a cat’s head on a geisha’s body, but the stamping didn’t work out right.  I had trouble with this in that the ink I used to stamp with didn’t dry properly, and after waiting two days for it to stop smudging, I gave up and just coated it with acrylic medium.  The stamps and the decoupage images are pasted onto muslin. 

One nice thing about this book cover is that it’s textured.  I had a sample book of some textured papers, and one had dots all over it like braille graffiti.  When I pasted it to the underside of the muslin and pressed, the texture transferred itself to the cloth.  The faint brown bird and branch overlay is a stamp with copper embossing powder.

 This book, unlike many of the ones I did, has colored endpapers.  I don’t like doing the endpapers, because I don’t often get them placed in properly, and because I often lack paper of the proper weight that isn’t either very plain or too expensive. Perhaps I need to make more trips to the paper store….