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.

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….

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 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.)