The Paper Place is having a contest to give away a sample pack of every Chiyogami paper they offer in their online store — an 8.5×11” sheet of all 637 patterns. Enter by putting a comment on their website.
Chiyogami paper folds very crisply and is really strong. I use it in my miniature folded haiku book and as part of my blizzard and crown book instruction kits.
The other day I met my friend Sharon at San Francisco’s Modern Museum of Art to see the 1000 Journals Project. In 2000, an anonymous SF-based artist began leaving blank journals around the city, each with a message inviting participants to draw, paste, rip, or write on its pages, and then pass it on when finished. Some of the completed books have made their way back to him, and he’s displayed the results on a website, as a book, in a documentary film, and now a museum exhibit. At the exhibition are several actual journals viewers can page through, as well as reproductions of many spreads. There’s also a table covered with pens, crayons, markers, scissors and magazines, where visitors can contribute to several on-going journals.
Last year I started a journal with the idea of making a collage a day. I kept at it a few months, although not every day. It never got easier — I hoped that I’d find them relaxing to make, but I often wasn’t able to find time in the day and constructing them seemed too much like a chore. Sharon suggested I try again, and even bought cheap blank books for both of us to use. One of her ideas is to incorporate found objects, using the found thing as a jumping off point for the collage.
What did I think of the exhibition? Looking at the pages I was struck by how messy they seemed to me and how all my own work is tidy and mostly on grids (or a least lined up) and so much more constrained and you might even say uptight. Maybe that’s why I give up on paper journals but surprise myself by continuing to blog. The blog/journal entries are neat and orderly and that all important constrained thing — which suits my temperament.
These beautiful letterpress printed stamps where designed by Gavin Potenza and printed by DWRI letterpress. They use some of the designs from his poster A Field Guide to the Stamps of the World. Potenza says “the stamps were each inspired by various elements surrounding the culture of the countries, including the Swiss-born color theorist Johannes Itten, old French Tarot cards, the Brazilian boardwalk Copacabana, German designer Otl Aicher, Mayan patterns, the Swiss Alps, sweater patterns, and op artist Victor Vasarely.”
A different take on the “altered book” — these use old books as the basis for jewelry. Be sure to have a look at all of Betty Pepper’s Book Keeping series.
For my recent book Walking, I wanted to print the insides on one long piece of paper. I had paper long enough — 26 inches — and with the correct grain. But it is a thin Japanese-like paper and I didn’t want the interior to be semi-transparent.
The solution was to laminate another piece of paper to the printed sheet. I tried using wet glue, but my gluing skills aren’t good (or patient) enough. Plus the whole thing curled, despite putting it under weight (it curled because the papers I tried were stronger than the thin paper, and when glued together, the stronger paper pulled at the lighter paper). I tried a non-wet adhesive (Yes paste) which doesn’t cause the paper to curl but it’s hard to work with on such a long sheet.
That’s when I remembered my Xyron laminator. I bought it originally to make kitchen magnets (it sandwiches a piece of paper between a magnet and thin protective plastic) but I also had cartridges that would apply glue to one side of a piece of paper. You feed the paper through the machine, turning the handle and the cartridge applies the glue or magnet sandwich. No electricity or batteries needed. The glue is spread evenly and the resulting sheet is easy to apply to another piece of paper. It’s not wet glue, so the paper doesn’t curl. The Xyron comes in several sizes. I happen to have the 9″ one, which turns out to be over-kill (and wasteful) for most of the projects I do — the 5″ wide model would have probably been a better choice.
I was excited to see my friends Carolee & Jennie, aka PodPost, at the table next to mine at the BABA Book Jam in October. We got to visit and catch up. But best of all was seeing their happy reaction when author Lisa Sonora Beam showed up with her book The Creative Entrepreneur, which features PodPost (you can see their trademark badge sashes in the book spread to the right). The book shows you how to make and keep an Artist’s Business Journal — a visual approach to business development for people who want to make a business out of their creative work. While I only got to browse through the book, what I saw was fun to read and fun to look at. It has a special appeal this time of year when I’m starting to think about getting organized for next year (what is it about November and December that makes me feel like such a disorganized mess that I spend all of January trying to straighten and clean up my life?)