This is my favorite book, and I almost considered keeping it rather than giving it away.  I wanted to do a cover that was almost entirely cloth, because I like the soft tactile feel of it.  I collaged it using a sewing machine, as I did with the glass fish book (not posted, as I lost the photos.)  From that project I learned that sewing machines don’t like to sew through clumps of ribbon.  To get around this, I layered tissue paper over the top of the cloth and ribbon, and when I was done, I tore the tissue paper off.  They do make special paper that will dissolve in water, so you don’t have to tear it off, but I have too many art supplies as it is.

I had already drilled holes in the coins to make a coin belt, but I decided not to use them because the edges were slightly sharp and would cut through thread if they were shaken frequently.  I sewed them with sturdy thread, so I think they will do just fine unless the book is put in someone’s belt and shimmied.  I sewed the beads on to add a little more texture, and to hold down some of the loose material.

The end papers are a handmade paper from Tibet that I bought at an import store when I was in Seattle a couple years ago.

For this book cover I started by gessoing over cotton cloth.  Then I impressed in the wet gesso with some stamps. There’s a crysanthemum, a cherry branch, and a geisha, as well as something that looks like a stylized five pointed blossom.  When the gesso dried, I painted over it with greenish and gold metallic acrylic. I rubbed some of the paint off to emphasize the texture.

The fimo embellishments were ones I made several months ago.  I rolled out a thin slab of translucent fimo, then pressed stamps into it.  After that I cut wedges and a center circle by using an apple corer.  After they were baked, I painted them gold.  The effect was rather more subtle than I liked, so I emphasized them with the maple leaf paper. 

The paper is tough (expensive) multi-print washi that I bought in Japan. I used some more for the endpapers, and for the strip on the back cover.  The gold stamp on the spine was one that was issued while I was in Japan as part of their “International Letter-Writing Week”.  I wrote a lot of letters (hundreds and hundreds) in the two years I was there, so I came to be very familiar with every stamp in the 130 yen denomination.

This book has endpapers that resemble shiny aubergine colored cloth.  Its cover has a base of gessoed cotton.  I wanted to use collage images, but I’m finicky about stealing work from others, so I used stuff I had lying around. The words are lines from my short story ‘Emily’s Fifth Birthday’ cut into strips and painted various shades of red and purple.  The oak leaf motif is a photocopy from the design I did for my fake tattoo this April fool’s day.  The crow is a sketch from my notebook. 

The red color is from a translucent red cloth. I have three or four layers of cloth, and interspaced the other design elements within them so that there were degrees of translucency.  I adhered the whole thing down with acrylic medium.

The letters are from a scrapbooking elements box.  Betsy Hasman helped me with the Latin.  She assures me it means “I write.”  I considered other languages, but Latin won because of the conservation of E factor. Those letter kits never have enough Es.

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.