Turkish map fold – Page 5 – Green Chair Press Blog

Prompt Challenge: Exoteric

exoteric. adj; Popular; simple; commonplace.

This is my 7th prompt challenge word and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. Each week the word has given me multiple new structures or ideas to investigate, and after 7 words the list has gotten quite long. And I’m still working on Turkish Map Fold ideas generated from the very first word! So this week I shoehorned the challenge into something I’m already doing.
Over the past several months I’ve been making collages to use in my calendar design for next year. I make most of my collages on paper that I have letterpress printed a haiku along the bottom. The haiku I thought appropriate for “exoteric” is

Listen around the bustle,
delight in the everyday–
the rest is noise.

The collage pictured is the result. I did another too, which you can see here.
Next word: morceau. n; 1. Piece; morsel. 2. An excerpt or passage of poetry or music.

Flower Maps

Over the past several weeks I’ve continued to play with a variation on the Turkish Map Fold. I thought an image that spanned the entire book might work well and revisited the pictures I took in Mt. Rainier National Park some years ago. The photos and structure fit a haiku I wrote last year, and I especially like the effect of printing photos on the reverse, giving the viewer something to look at on the underside of the folds. I was so pleased with the results that I’ve made an edition of 15. It’s called Flower Maps and you can see many more photos here.

Prompt Challenge: Perspicacious

perspicacious, adj; Having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.

This week’s challenge word was much easier than last week, at any rate I could use it in a sentence! First I listed people who I thought were perspicacious, and wondered how they got that way. This lead me to the word “understanding” in the definition and I started to go pretty far afield. I thought perhaps these koans might be something to look at. But then I found this John Lennon quote

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

I’d been playing with the turkish map fold from a few weeks ago and wanted to use it for this week’s word, incorporating text in the map folds, not just pictures or relying on colors. So I made a list of things that made me happy to use with the Lennon quote. I printed my list on the front and back of the sheets I would use for the folds as well as the cover. I even used paper and colors that made me happy.
Here’s the result (to see how to make this book, see the instructions here).This one is really a personal book as everyone’s happy list is different. I’ve got it displayed above my workbench, knowing it will make me happy, months from now, just looking at it.
perspicacious

Next word: slimsy, adj. flimsy; frail. a blend of slim and flimsy.

How To: More on the Turkish Map Fold

After making my first prompt challenge book using the turkish map fold, I kept thinking about the fold and how I might use it in other books. I tried making a book with multiple folded pages, glued together, but the result was unsatisfying. The folds from the last couple of steps seemed to be in the way, making the pages difficult to open. So I tried stopping at the 5th step, where the page or sheet looks like the figure on the left.
I glued a few of these pages together but didn’t much like the results of that either. After more fiddling around, I tried gluing 2 folds together, turning the result 90 degrees, and gluing them to one half of a piece of card stock (with the point at the outer edge). The card stock is the same size as the original sheet of paper. When I glued another pair of folds to the other side of the card stock, I had a structure that opened quite wonderfully! And a place in the center for some text. (The 2 rectangles at either end make a cover that opens from the center.)

Opening the book reminded me of a flower blooming. Here’s a model I made, with one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, Bee! I am expecting you!

How To: Turkish Map Fold

I’ve used this folding technique for my book Summer as well for a book I did as part of my on-going prompt challenge, shown in this blog post. David Rosen taught me this fold. He had instructions on his website, but they (and it) have disappeared.
The photo above shows an example of the fold (an invitation to an exhibition of works by Julie Chen.)
Directions for the fold are here.

UPDATE: Click here to see other posts on the Turkish Map Fold and its variations.

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.