My book is finally finished. It's 34 pages (17 sheets), made of a variety of papers, photos, postage stamps, etc. I included pages from antique Japanese books, plus my own hand-painted, hand-dyed papers, and a lot of inks and stains.
Was it fun to do? Oh, yeah. Was it frustrating? Immensely. Does it look as I intended? The photos do not. I had a certain look I was going for with the pictures, but due to computer meltdowns, printer meltdowns, printer replacement, and renewed experimenting, nothing seemed to work. So there aren't many photos in this book and I had to slightly change the concept.
What I LOVE about this book is how it feels. It's soft, old, has a weathered feeling. There's a tab attached to one page that I can lift and peek to see what's underneath (the closeup image with the blue stitching is the tab). The more this book is handled, touched, bent, looked at, etc., the better it's going to be. It's MEANT to be held.
I used Japanese stab binding to create a daifuku-cho (Japanese ledger book) look. And there are indeed some Japanese ledger pages used here and there.
This was an incredible learning curve (for me), involving collage, paint, ink, printing, stitching, binding, PATIENCE, and more.
What's next? A runner for my dining room table made along this same collage-like concept.
And then? A series of artist books . . . we shall see.
©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.
