Prompt Challenge: Truss

I’ve challenged myself this year to use a different word each week (the word featured each Monday on dictionary.com) to get me into my studio and developing some new ideas. My first word was truss. I thought that if nothing else came to mind, I would use the meaning “to tie, bind, or fasten” to sew an interesting binding on a blank book. I wondered if I could use whatever pattern one might use to truss a chicken. But a Google image search for truss brought up only pictures for the engineering or architectural meaning: “any of various structural frames based on the geometric rigidity of the triangle,” in particular for bridges.

This lead me in search of book structures with triangular pages. The one above is an elegant triangle book by Karen Hanmer (She has a lovely gallery of her work on her website.)

Or, on the left, Dennis Yuen’s book with triangle pages and coptic binding. Right is an accordion triangle book by Lolita of Daily Threads.

But as I stood at my bench making models of triangle books, I kept thinking about the covered bridges I visited in Vermont this past summer. Especially the one above close to my sister’s that was unusual for being a railroad covered bridge. And a haiku I had written about the bridge

Abandoned bridge.
A view into
yesterday.

That’s when I hit on the idea of using a turkish map fold (more on how to do this fold later this week), which involves triangles. And I was lucky enough to find photos online of views looking into and out of the bridge (of course the pictures I took were only of the outside!) Here’s the results:

Partially open

Fully open

the back and front covers

The word for next week: heterotelic, adj. Having the purpose of its existence or occurrence apart from itself.