Prompt Challenge – Page 4 – Green Chair Press Blog

Prompt Challenge: Birds and em-dashes (part 3)

In my small book collection, I have a double-sided accordion book, “Summer Day | Winter Night” where Claire Van Vliet printed Ruth Fine’s linocuts. It’s exquisitely constructed and has some very nice touches. The linocut was printed on several sheets, then connected together, then folded in half horizontally, and finally folded into an accordion. This hides the seams and allows you to make an infinite length double-sided accordion. There’s a small tab at the end of the accordion to facilitate pulling out & unfolding the book. A similar tab folds over the front cover, giving you a hint of what’s inside.

For my first model (after spending about a week drawing birds), I tried using a similar structure. The idea was to cut out the shape for the windows using my cutting plotter, fold the paper in half, and affix the tissue with the illustration inside the fold. Turns out that the paper, when folded, can’t be too bulky. I want to use paper I have in my studio, and I discovered that Mohawk Superfine & Arches were too bulky, and my cutting plotter balked at cutting Rives (too fibrous I suspect, although it seems to pass the bulk test). Here’s the model, using Arches paper. There’s a seam between the 2nd & 3rd panels and the 4th & 5th—these contribute to making the structure too bulky to fold properly. Next step is to see if I can make this without the seams.

Model for my Prompt Challenge

Prompt Challenge: Birds and em-dashes (part 2)

cardinal I’m working on a book with an Emily Dickinson poem in it (see my first post here), and thinking about using stained glass windows like the one to the left as illustrations. A double-sided accordion, where you can see the windows from the front and the back, seems like it’s worth pursuing. But what text to put on the back of the accordion? Dickinson to the rescue… The following poem has bird imagery and the same number of stanzas and many em-dashes, so it seems like a good candidate:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet—never—in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of me.

My current idea is to print the window illustrations on tissue or rice paper, cut holes in the accordion and affix the tissue over the cutout. Light could then come through the “window,” and the illustration would be the same on both the front and back.

Prompt Challenge: Birds and em-dashes

bobolink Earlier this year, I started a prompt challenge where I used a word a week to inspire some bookmaking. It was a lot of work, and I gave up in exhaustion after a couple of months. But it certainly generated a lot of ideas and led to several new books. Now I’m going to try a different sort of prompt — specific poems.
Bear with me while I get to the poem I’m going to try…. I use em-dash (the long one —) when I write out my haiku, but my set of metal Bembo only has the short en-dash, so when I handset Summer in Vermont, I used periods instead of dashes. This fall I finally got around to buying some em-dashes. In the meantime I started drawing the birds that congregate at the bird feeder in my front yard.
Then my Mom sent me some Emily Dickinson poems, notorious for the use of the em-dash. One poem in particular struck me as perfect for a prompt challenge, as it uses bird imagery and plenty of dashes.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I, just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

When I think of churches, the first thing that comes to mind is stained glass windows, so my initial idea is to combine windows and bird images — that’s one I did of a bobolink above. I’m not giving myself a deadline on this one, but I’ll keep reporting back as I get more ideas and build models…

Binding in a Mapfold

I’ve been wanting to incorporate the turkish map fold into one more book structure — how would I bind it into a book with a text block? The first book class I took, with Kumi Korf, made a book with a shadowbox at the end. I used what I learned in that class to make my book Haiku. So I went back to that book to see if it gave me any ideas for. I particularly liked that the last “page” of the book was related to the contents of the shadowbox. Unfortunately the spine construction wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I made a few models and decided to use a spine that would accommodate the text block on the left side and the mapfold on the right. Here’s the model, so you can see the spine. On the left is a piece of folded cardstock that holds the mapfold — a picture of the bridge on the outside opens up to a photo of the inside of the bridge — see the second picture below.

Prompt challenge: 2013 calendars

Last January I challenged myself to take a word a week and use it as inspiration to make a book (or, really, anything). In April I got busy with other things, and stopped. But not before I had enough ideas for a year’s worth of bookmaking. One week I made half a dozen collages and I’ve used those as the starting point for my 2013 calendar. Despite my spotty blogging since April, I’ve been slowly and steadily working away on the calendar, and yesterday I finished. They are printed, cut, collated and stored in their plastic stands, waiting to be sold this fall. That’s a pile of them on the left. As with all my other calendars, this one has a design and haiku for each month—for July (shown):

wildflower dance—
up to my knees
in pink.

Prompt Challenge: Catechize

catechize, v; to instruct orally by means of questions and answers, especially in Christian doctrine.

First, a fun fact: catechize was first used in the sense of “to question” by Shakespeare in Othello (Act 3, Scene 4). Desdemona is looking for Cassio and she asks the Clown if he knows where to find him:
DESDEMONA: Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN: I will catechize the world for him, that is, make questions, and by them answer.

I was pretty stumped by this week’s word, until I reread the definition and saw the synonyms: interrogate, quiz, examine, probe. I decided then to concentrate on the question/probe part of the definition.
Every year about this time, I start working on my calendar design. And every year I try out some layouts that aren’t my usual 12-pages-with-haiku-and-design-that-fit-in-a-plastic-CD-case. Regardless of the layout and size, haiku is always an element, and one of the big challenges is to write poems that are worth reading and re-reading and contemplating for an entire month. For this week, I attempted to substitute pithy (but not too serious nor too silly) questions into my layout, rather than haiku.
The layout I’m working with groups the months into 4 sets of 3 months. For each set, there are 3 related collages that overlap by using longer and longer pages, so that the bottom of the 2nd and 3rd months can be seen while looking at the first month and the bottom of the 3rd month can be seen when viewing the 2nd. I mocked-up one set, April, May and June….

The challenge, though, was the questions. Here’s the three I came up with:

What super-hero would you be, what would your costume look like & what would be your motto?
What’s your first memory?
What’s the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to you?

And here’s April in more detail:

Next up:grouse, v; To grumble; complain.