I love paper and my studio is filled with sheets of all sorts — patterned, colored, textured, plain, and lots of different weights. And there’s a big drawer full of sample books. I’m always looking for new paper sources and experimenting with the paper I have.
I buy a lot of paper from French Paper, and the other day I ran across a website they’ve set up to show off projects using their papers—the French Sample Room. That’s where I found this tunnel book. They don’t seem to link back to the original designer, unfortunately.
James Felici has posted an article about “how a change in papermaking technology caused a revolution in type design (and upsetting some delicate sensibilities in the process).” He starts out
John Baskerville is known best as the man who, in the mid-18th century, created a new typeface that now bears his name. It was finer, more delicate, and lighter on the page than all that went before it, and it opened the door to a new genre of type designs: the so-called modern faces, including Bodoni and Didot. As such, Baskerville and faces like it are commonly referred to as transitionals, the bridges between oldstyle and modern.
But Baskerville’s innovative types—and those that followed—could only have existed because of his arguably more important innovation: a new papermaking technique that yielded sheets whose smoother surface could reproduce much finer detail in both type and graphics, including etchings and engravings.
Read the rest here. And see all of his articles on Creative Pros.
I’m a sucker for almost any type of paper. I found this seed paper (really a plant-able paper tape full of seeds) on Etsy recently. I suppose it caught my eye because I’ve just put my garden to bed for the winter and taken stock of what just survived, what did well and what succumbed to the heat, dryness and rabbits. I’m already thinking about what I’ll do next spring…
About a month ago, I splurged and bought a cutting plotter — it cuts and scores shapes one has designed in Illustrator. I’ve wanted to make a few pop-up books, but all the hand-cutting has been a big deterrent.
I’ve spent the past several weeks learning the foibles of the machine. My first “pop-up” was a simple papercut to illustrate one of my haiku — that’s it to the left.
I’ve used this variation in my last two prompt challenge words. I got the idea from Jeannine, who said she “start(s) with 2 straight folds (horizontal and vertical) and only one diagonal.” Here’s how to fold it — in the fourth step below, reverse the crease on the diagonal fold to get a square that is half the size of the original sheet.
I took 4 folded sheets and glued them to a backing sheet to get this:
Gluing the folded sheets back-to-back, and rotating each sheet 180 degrees as you glue, like the picture on the right, gives you an accordion book that has a wonderful slinky-like action to it. Below is a model I made that I hung up in my studio.
My friend Cathy calls these “Lotus Books,” and she has an example here and more complete instructions in this PDF.
Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord calls them “diamond fold books” and she has more examples on her website.
All my posts on Turkish Map Folds, the variations and examples can be found here.
Last Monday I stopped into a store that sold handmade journals here in Santa Fe. One of the journals used the same fold I used in last week’s prompt challenge, only instead of putting them on a backing sheet, she stacked and glued them. When opened, the pages were quite sinuous — almost like playing with a slinky! I immediately knew I’d use that structure for this week’s word.
When I was making collages a couple of weeks ago, I’d run across some paper I’d bought for a project years ago — Canson mi-tienes in coordinating colors (see to the left). The colors made me think of summer. I used them to make a model of the structure and hung it up in my studio — that’s it on the right. 
The result had a wonderful springy elastic quality, and hanging it allowed me to admire the colors.
I’ve always loved mobiles (as a kid, I remember seeing Calder mobiles at museums and being fascinated). My collages often have a cascade of coordinating colors, and I thought it would be interesting to use strands of the folded paper to turn my collages into something 3D by making a mobile.
The squares for the model on the right are 4″. I thought that was too big, so I made several chains of various sizes. I liked the results with 1″ squares best, but I couldn’t really tell if the mobile would be what I wanted with just one strand. I hoped a model with 9 strands would tell me — and while that was a lot of folding, it went rather quickly by coupling the folding with mindlessly watching TV!
You can see the result below. Once constructed, unfortunately the strands aren’t really bendy or sinuous anymore. It reminds me of chimes. This afternoon it was quite warm, and I had the door open. The gentle breeze that came through rustled the paper strands together, making a lovely musical sound.
Next up: profluent, adj; Flowing smoothly or abundantly forth.