It's been weeks since I've updated you guys with my new favorite hobby/class! I am happy to present you all with my adventures in bookbinding, volume 2. We've been pretty busy in class, and usually get through one good sized book and one paper/demonstration type book each meeting. These are just some personal favorites and or technically impressive books I've made in the past few weeks.
This is my long stitch book. It has sixty pages split up into six folios. I added a
Harkavagrant to the cover when I got home that day so I could use it didn't look so plain. I'm fully planning on using it as a journal.
Since this was my first attempt at this type of stitch I didn't make it very tight. I'd like to tell you I've improved since this was done four weeks ago, but I still have a hard time getting really tight stitches.
This week and last we worked on these Japanese bound books (my teacher doesn't think this is the right title for this kind of binding but he can't seem to come up with anything better, so I'm just going to call it that. No offense to any real binders). Today we actually decorated the covers and put everything together, so there was glue everywhere today! I'm still picking it off my nails. This stitch we worked on last week in a paper bound example book. It isn't very pretty and kind of weird looking or else i'd post photos of it too. I got the stitch much tighter then all of my previous sewing excursions, but then had a hard time typing everything off and it got loose again. Regardless I still think it's super pretty. I could be biased though.
Now this is my first project. I know it's small, and in this picture looks like either a very weird eraser or a blue brick, but I promise it is a book, and it is kind of amazing. See that face. That's my "be impressed" face.
Okay, that really isn't my be impressed face, but i think you should anyway.
It's actually an accordion book! There are 13 "pages" on the inside and 12 on the outside. Each page has a slug-line on it, and it creates a do it yourself story as well as experiments with interior and exterior locations. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm sad I haven't been able to get any stellar pictures of it though.
It's not a great picture, I know, but it's a really long book and I have a really wonky webcam.
Now, when I was presenting this to my class I realized that slug-lines are a weird thing, but really they are very simple.
By definiton, a slug-line is the scene heading in a screenplay. It is made up of three parts : INT/EXT (determining if the location is interior or exterior, for lighting purposes), The actual location, and the time of day.
Here are some of my favorites:
INT. SUBURBAN HOME - DAY
INT. BOOKSTORE - NIGHT
EXT. TREE HOUSE - DAY
EXT. ICE CREAM TRUCK - DAY
EXT. TRAIN STATION - NIGHT
So that's how my adventures in bookbinding are going thus far. When we get back from spring break we're working on a more 'bookish' book, which I'm really excited for. I'm also really surprised at how my opinion of books as physical objects has changed. Usually for me a book is just the medium in which an awesome story is being told, and I never put much thought into the actual process of binding, or artists books in general, but know I have a much greater appreciation for books as psychical objects, and wish there were more collaborations between artists books and best sellers.
