This is a book I made for Ann Vandermeer.  I knew I was going to see her and wanted to give her a book, so I made something a little weird. 

The cover is Chinese New Year’s money pasted over a muslin background for strength.  I pasted a nearly translucent piece of cotton cloth over that, as the printing on the fake money has a tendency to come off.

The vines are a rubber stamp, with pigment based ink.  The pigment based ink, I’ve found, takes a long time to dry, which makes it good for embossing but not for when you’re trying to finish a project quickly.  I painted the entire book with acrylic medium to keep the ink from smearing, which made it slightly tacky but will also protect the spine from wear.  

The fruit faces are fimo painted over with gold interference paint.  I would have liked to use my own face molds, but the ones I made are plaster and I don’t know if they will work with fimo.  I may try in a later project, because I don’t like using other’s designs, even if copyright free.

This book is approx. 3″ x4″.  Here’s the post where I explained how I made the books.

I don’t have anything finished right now, so I thought I would post some tiles that I made last year. These are hand made tiles, slip trailed with neutral colored slip from a jacquard bottle.  After I bisque fired them, I used the slip trails as a border for the glazes.  If I were to do it again, I’d use the “French Impressions” 3d low fire glazes to get the effect I want.  Slip trailing is a lot more work.

I made this book because I wanted to experiment with leather covers.  The leather is a bit thicker than I would have liked (6-7oz) but that thickness is supposed to be superior for tooling.  The design is based on one of my favorite fairy tales “Ivan and the Firebird”.  On the cover, the firebird is eating one of the tsar’s cherries, and on the back, Ivan’s hand is grasping one of the firebird’s feathers. 

After tooling, but before painting, I painted the leather with gold ink.  This sank into the tooling marks and hid the pinkish tone of the leather. It also put down a basecoat that helped with the icon-painting feel I was going for.  I used mica pigments for the bird’s feathers, and interference violet to highlight the crest feathers.

This is one of my handmade books approx. 3 X4 ” and 1/2″ thick.  It has a collaged cloth and paper cover, with sewn embellishment. (I didn’t make the embellishment.)

To create the cover of this book, I first started by stamping onto a piece of muslin.  You can see the postmarks of the stamp in the upper right hand corner.  After the pigment had dried, I attached the muslin to the semitransparent green fabric with acrylic medium.  I sewed the copper beads on before gluing the spine stiffening board to the inside of the fabric.  I made the leather strip for the buckle out of green suede, and attached the freshwater pearls to it by sewing with fine wire.  Glue didn’t hold the buckle as well as I would have liked, so I sewed the leaf on top of it to help hold it on.  The buckle is functional.