My little haiku book (it’s only 1½” x 1½”), made with Hedi Kyle’s blizzard book folding technique, was featured on Mental Floss yesterday, in a feature called 10 Miniature Books We Covet. Be sure to check out the other books here.
Having spent the last week binding my latest edition, with my usual struggle to keep glue off every surface, I’m in awe of the binders who submitted work to the 2013 Design Binder Competition. This year they bound Shakespeare plays. The one above is Macbeth, by Jan Zimmerlich. My little books are paper covered boards with a bit of book cloth for the spine. These are so elaborate!
See them all here.
Now that I’ve finished all 4 of my season-themed miniature books, I thought I’d make a box that housed them all. The enclosure is constructed by attaching together the slipcases I’ve been making for the individual books (see how to make those here). The difference is the individual slipcases are all paper, while the larger box uses book cloth for the slipcase spines and for the flap that closes them up. That’s the box closed, to the left, and then opened up below.
Back in November, when I finished my season-themed miniature book on fall, I thought designing the final book in the set—spring—would be easy. After all spring is a time of rebirth and color. But every time I sat down to work on it, all I could focus on was the long list of house projects we had lined up as soon as it got warm again. I didn’t want winter to end.
Then in late April the daffodils I planted last fall started to bloom. But the tipping point to actually getting started was mid-May when we had a huge influx of migrating birds and a pair of robins starting building a very large nest in a tree outside my studio window. So in between all those house projects, I got the book designed, printed and assembled. Like the other 3 books, there’s a surprise at the end—this time it’s a pop-up bouquet of spring flowers. I’ve called it “I Wake to a Warming World: Spring” and you can see all the spreads here. The other books in the series are Summer in Vermont, One More Blanket on the Bed. Fall., and Winter’s Song.
One of the first bookmaking how-to books I bought was Shareen LaPlantz’s Cover to Cover. While that book is still in print, LaPlantz other book Innovative Bookbinding: Secret Compartments & Hidden Messages, which published in 2 hand-bound editions in 1997 and 2000, isn’t. That book had hand-bound tip-ins, a secret pocket, a pull-down mechanical, stitched booklets and a hidden tunnel book. Since LaPlantz died in 2003, it seemed unlikely that the book would be reissued. Laura Russell has a nice post on her blog about how the unlikely happened, as well has details about how the book was remade to be print-on-demand. You can see & order the new 3rd edition here.
In June, I attended the Focus on Book Arts conference, and took Aimee Lee’s class “Paper like leather, Bark like thread: Korean Paper Techniques.” Over 3 days, we were introduced to various traditional Korean techniques of manipulating handmade paper and bark. One technique was jiseung, or paper weaving, which transforms strips of paper into cords that can be twined into all manner of objects, including baskets and book covers, like the one on the left.
First Aimee boiled long pieces of kozo, the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, which has long and strong fibers. After it was soft, we each got a piece to play with. The picture below is “bark lace,” where the fibers are tweezed apart to make a lacy pattern. Single strands can be pulled off to make thread.
 Then we cut parent sheets of hanji (paper made with kozo in the Korean technique) into long strips, and made two-ply cords out of them, by rubbing 2 strips together in our palms. I think we made 16, enough practice to really get the hang of the motions required to twine the strips as well as to get even tension (something I finally got on the last 2 cords). Here are my first attempts…
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Then Aimee showed us how weave the cords (using a basket weave) to make “book covers.” In the picture below, I have reached then end of the cover—the non-woven space in the middle is for the spine of the book. As a non-crocheter, non-knitter and non-weaver, this was all a bit foreign. You can see I’ve dropped (or missed) some stitches, but I quite liked the handwork and repetition. Aimee showed us how to make a round basket as well, but I decided to make several book covers instead so I would be able to replicate the weave at home. While the class was working away. Aimee collected up all our scrap cords and made exquisite little baskets—no more than an inch wide, like the ones to the right.
After the cover was done, I decided to cut my bark lace into “pages” and sew them, using the kozo thread, into the spine of the book. A completely hanji book… (I wasn’t quite done when the picture was taken, and that’s the kozo thread hanging off the back)
I like it very much because it is so unlike my other work—the cover is soft and unformed, the inside brittle. It’s not overly thought-out. Aimee told us that Koreans have used paper from books and official documents (with text on them) to weave baskets and animals and other forms, and this got to be a problem because people were stealing important papers to use in the weaving. I’m planning on letterpress printing secrets or poetry on large sheets of hanji, cutting them down, twining them and weaving to see what I get.
Below is the book made by my table-mate Julie. She makes paper and knows how to knit, crochet, and weave. And she makes baskets. This could have been daunting, but she was really helpful when my fingers & brain refused to be coordinated and got me unstuck numerous times. She used her own paper for the inside of her book, and she died the cords with her own handmade dye before she wove the cords.
