This book project is DONE!

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.

What I'm working on . . .

I have been working on (since it seems forever) making a handmade book. I’ve been thinking of it as a “Kyoto” book, since I’m incorporating photographs I took In Japan, but it’s really not about Kyoto.

I’ve completed 10 pages. And have maybe 20 more to go. It’s 12” wide and 4.5” high and thick. It will be Japanese stab-bound on the left side. And it will be meant to be hung on a wall by a cord. The style is similar to a daifuku-cho, a Japanese ledger book.

Each page is a collage, both front and back, with the back much simpler, less detailed than the front. This unnamed book is designed to be held, touched, bent, paged through. It feels soft, worn, weathered, ragged, frayed, and irregular.

This year I’ve been gathering together appropriate papers for the book — papers I’ve dyed, inked, stained, painted, crumpled, torn, folded, and sometimes waxed. The collage items are old postage stamps, hanko signatures (“chops”), postal cancellations, rice paper images, rubber stamps, water stains, pages from antique Japanese books and ledgers, and much, much more.

Since I’ve never done this before, I’m winging it, seeing how my photographs handle being tinted, how glues hold up when the papers get wet, and how my printer inks react with water. My printer ceased working and so I got a new one. But the inks are markedly different and don’t react the same way, causing my processes to change constantly.

So here are bits and pieces of what I’m doing. From upper left to right you see a sample unfinished page sitting on top of other papers, a close-up of a page, examples of postage stamps I have to choose from, then my “paper table,” photos that I’ve stained and are now drying, another sample unfinished page, a number of signature hankos (chops) that I use here and there, a close-up of a stained paper (doesn’t that look cool?), and a close-up of part of another page.

I. Love. This. The process has been a huge learning curve, trial and (mostly) error. Full of surprises (always a good thing), and the book pages/collages are wonderful to hold, to page through, to curl and bend and touch. They even sound good, sometimes crackling, sometimes softly brushing one another.

Having projects, having a purpose, making something is important to me. And in my mostly digital world, having a physical result is most refreshing! I will attempt to update more and more as things have begun speeding up. Wish me luck!

©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.