I had a cookie jar from CostCo, that came with biscotti in it, but while I was gone last summer the kids broke it. I decided to make a replacement for it. I had the shape of what I wanted in my head, based off of a talavera jar I bought in Mexico.  I didn’t quite manage to make it exactly right, but at least the lid fit.

I hand built this with coils of B-mix, with a slab for the base.  It took a long time to make it, scraping and smoothing, etc.  The lid was a pinch pot that I added a coil to on the inside for support. The little crow is sculpted.

For the grape-leaf sprigging, I used some leaves from my garden (dating from before the leafhopper and skeletonizer incidents)  I rolled out a thin slab of clay and then laid leaves on top, then rolled on top of the leaves to embed the veins into the clay.  Then I cut around the outside, trying to emulate the serrated edge of the grape leaves.  After that, I carefully peeled the leaves off and used the best ones to make sprig molds out of plaster.  The plaster took too long to cure, so I wasn’t able to use them during that pottery session, but by this summer I was ready.  The vines are rolled clay scored and dinged with tools, and the tendrils are from a garlic press.

After the first firing, the jar looked just fine.  I spread green stain over it, then wiped most of it off. The crow got painted with black stain.  After that I put white glaze inside, and sprayed it with clear glaze outside.  I fired the lid and body seperately, because I’ve lost too many covered jars when the lid fused to the base, and after all the time I’d spent making this, I didn’t want it to get ruined. 

Unfortunately, it kind of got ruined anyway.  Cracks in both the base and lid appeared during the glaze firing; I’m not sure why.  I don’t know how long this jar is going to withstand the attentions of children, as I intend to fill it with cookies very soon.  When it finally breaks (and I’m sure it will) I’ll save the pieces and use them in some kind of tile mosaic.  I’ve got a whole box of broken crockery I’m saving just for that purpose.

I disliked the glaze on this bowl, but other found it the best of the series. This bowl cracked during bisque firing–porcelain can be extremely temperamental–but I was able to salvage it with paperclay.  The stamps on the side are an oak leaf and a dragonfly.

For the base of this book’s cover, I started with a piece of cotton cloth to which I adhered black paper with a block print of a swallow on it.  I had some paper scraps left over from end papers from different books, so I adhered them onto the black paper with acrylic medium. I had a happy accident with the red paper, in that when you put it over black paper, using clear acrylic medium, the background paper turns transparent, bringing the design to the fore.

From a design aspect, this book worked perfectly. From a technical aspect, I had issues with it.  The cover material, once the different layers of paper and acrylic are on it, is quite stiff. This is nice in that it’s sturdy, but it makes it very difficult to fold around the head of the spine.  Also, even though I weighed it down as the glue was drying, it came up a little along the front cover, so the edge isn’t tight.

I was going to use a flat glass marble with a picture adhered to the back of it as a focal point on the cover, but it didn’t quite suit the dramatic design.  Instead, I took an embellishment I’d made earlier out of a piece of translucent polymer clay stamped with the kanji.  After I baked it I gilded it with gold leaf.  All it needed was the black acrylic to bring out the depressions.  So much of this kind of mixed-media art involves making things and keeping them for use with later projects.  This is why my absolute favorite piece of furniture is my card catalog, stuffed with knick-knacks, embellishments, and some low-fired glazes for when I get my kiln working again. (Someday…)

I did this book right after the celadon book, so I wanted something that didn’t have any cloth except for the muslin base.  I had some handmade paper, and I used decorative paper-shaping scissors to cut the Victorian frame edge.  The scissors cut very poorly, and were difficult to use. I layered the gold and white floral paper on top of the pale green paper and then the others on top of it, making stripes.  I have a drawer of rubber stamps that I hardly use, so I took brown pigment ink and used four stamps with a pine theme. You can see the top of a pine cone underneath the circuit chip on the cover. 

After I’d stamped it, I remembered again why I so rarely use rubber stamps on paper.  It looked too simple, too clean.  I rubbed mica pigments in brown and gold over it, and the iridescence helped, but it still needed a little abstraction.  We’d just been to a wedding, and the bride and groom’s invitations had a lovely sheet of printed vellum in it.  Once I put that on top, it had the look I wanted.  It just needed some 3-D embellishments for a focal point on the cover.

By now I’d already decided who I was making this book for, so the circuit chip was my first choice.  Not only did it have an interesting shape, but it was a coordinating color. I just had to rip some of the wires off.  I had made the wedge shaped polymer clay embellishment a few months ago, using a sheet of translucent clay I’d rolled out, stamped, and then cut with an apple corer.  Some of the other wedges are on the Gold Japanese book, also posted on this site.  I bought the letter tiles from a secondhand game.  I’d hoped there was an X, but there wasn’t so Z was my second choice.  Z seems like the letter of the strange, of the end, of the unknown.

With this book I also had some technical issues.  First of all, the vellum and the sheets of handmade paper made the cover so thick that I could barely bend it. I decided to forego the strip of matboard that I usually use to support the spine.  It often feels as though when I make books, as when I write books, that I’m reinventing the process from scratch every time, no matter how many times I’ve done it.  The hardest part for me is trimming the cover so that it fits around the head and foot of the spine.  If I cut it too close, the edges and underside of the cover material show.  If I cut it too wide, I can’t fit the cover material under the spine. 

I tried to take a shortcut with this book and the celadon book, and found out that it wasn’t one I could take.  Gluing and cutting the end papers is the second hardest part of making a book like this.  One shortcut is to not put protective wax paper sheets between the sewn signatures and the cover material while I’m gluing the edges of the cover down to the boards.  This ends up gluing the first and last sheet of the book block to the cover, which functions as end papers.  I don’t like this because the end papers can really add a lot to the overall design of the book.  For this book and the celadon book, I decided to cut a half sheet of paper, covering only the board. The advantage of this was that since the paper was smaller, I had a wider selection to choose from (some of my finer papers are origami or paper designed for scrapbooking that are in smaller sizes.)  This looked terrible, as the linen tape and mull were visible at the edge of the end paper.  I had to cut new paper and put new endpapers in.

To cut the endpapers, I fold a sheet over, jam it in as close as I can to the inside corner, and then use a pencil to trace around the edges of the book block.  Then I cut it out and adhere it. I learned with this book that acrylic medium is much better for adhering paper to paper (in this instance) than is polyvinyl glue.   I’ve used paste before, but normally I only use paste to glue the mull to the boards, and I’d thrown out the rest of my batch assuming I wouldn’t use it before it went bad.

This was another mistake that turned out well.  I started with a piece of canvas to which I applied gesso. I wanted a dark color, so I poured black acrylic on it and brushed it around, only to find that the black became grey. No good.  While the paint was still thick and wet, I took a linoblock I’d cut of a laughing fox and impressed it into the paint.  Not only did this texture the gesso, but it also took off the tint, leaving two white outlines of a laughing fox on the canvas. I put more black paint over it, but realized if I spread it in it would ruin the image, so I left it there.

The cover material sat on my table for several days while I tried to figure out what to do with it. I considered just sewing a bunch of beads over it, but decided that would be too much work for too little gain.  What it needed was color. I chose a few shades of tissue paper, and a sheet of orange-and-gold joss paper, and tore them into chunks.  I adhered them directly over the image, overlapping them to get a multicolored effect.  Then I didn’t know what to do, so I let it dry.

The next day I realized that the laughing fox image was barely visible, and that I wanted to mirror it by another print on top of the colored tissue paper background.  I’d learned while doing the Celadon Book that you can’t use acrylic and rubber stamp here with our low humidity, but when I added 50% acrylic gel retarder to the paint I was able to get multiple prints before the paint dried.  Not only did it dry much quicker than water based block printing ink, but as a bonus, it became impermeable when dry, unlike the block printing ink. (My red swallow prints all smeared when I painted over them with clear acrylic medium, no matter how long they’d been left to dry.)  The only bad part was that the image didn’t turn out as clear as I’d hoped. I tried to touch it up with a sharpie, but it didn’t look like a laughing fox anymore, it looked like a fox that had something wrong with its mouth.

The buttons with letters were left over from the package I bought and used with the ‘Wicked Queen’ page of my altered art journal.  Lucky for me, I had enough letters to spell out “Fox Laughs.”  The endpapers (not shown) are buff batik hearts on a black background, matching the whimsy of the cover.  Sort of Aesop carnival.