Green Chair Press Blog

Jennifer Cartwright’s Seedpod Book

Below is an accordion fold book Jennifer Cartwright calls “Seedpod book.” Dimensions: 4.5” diameter, 22” length (unfolded). Each of the slices is constructed of two circular forms (of wire, hand-made paper, and acrylic) which are sewn to a ring of purple “skin” (made of burlap coated in hand-made paper and acrylic).
Cartwright constructs a skeleton out of wire then “the second major step is to ‘pull’ the wire forms up through a soup-like slurry of handmade paper pulp or, alternatively, to drizzle the pulp over the wire forms using a turkey baster. The wire forms, now encased in paper, are allowed to dry and are then coated with varnish or other acrylic media. Since dry paper is extremely porous and absorbent, capillary action draws the varnish and pigment deep into the paper. Once the varnish is dry, the wire/paper/acrylic forms are durable, waterproof, malleable and lightweight. As a final step, I often sew multiple forms together to create a finished piece.” Below the seedpod book are several other works. You can see lots more in her flickr stream

More Fishbone Fold

Alisa Golden has several posts on her blog about the fishbone fold. The first is a variation that has an even fore edge. In her picture below, the results from the original instructions are on the left, Alisa’s variation is on the right.

Alisa thought the even fore edges make the book more plant shaped. Below is a magnolia she saw and the book she made in response to it. More examples here.

Letter Patterns

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been reading Roberta Warshaw’s posts about making “Surface Pattern Designs.” The basic idea is to start with a shape and make a pattern from it. When she was done, she used the idea with letterforms for an alphabet book. One picture of the book is below, followed by another pattern using the letter b in black and white. See all the patterns and Roberta’s reports about her class starting here

Queen of French Knots

Each page of “Persimmons” has a word written in braille, made with french knots. Here’s a partial first page. I used my robocraft cutter to prick the pattern of the braille characters into the paper. Without that, I don’t know if the book would be possible, as the dots wouldn’t line up as exactly if I used another method to transfer the pattern to the pages.

Nona Orbach

Two books by Nona Orbach. The first is called “Sad Maps” (it’s an altered book) and the second is a scroll book called “My Heart is in the East.” Lots more here.

Happy 2015!

Happy 2015! Every year Pantone picks a “color of the year” and for 2015 it’s “marsala,” described as a “naturally robust and earthy red”, the rich wine hue is meant to embody “the satisfying richness of a fulfilling meal” and emanates “a sophisticated, natural earthiness”. It seems awfully old-fashioned to me, what do you think?