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.
Who knew that “pica” had a first meaning that isn’t about measurements. From wordsmith.org’s a.word.a.day
The biggest project I undertake each year is a letterpress printed desktop calendar, one page for each month with a graphic and one of my haiku. This will be my 6th calendar and today I started printing. The photo shows my set up—there’s one color for the graphic and one for the calendar & haiku. I set up a chase for the text and another for the graphic so it’s easy to swap for another month.
While the printing is time consuming and will take me at least until the end of the month, it’s the easy part of the project. Getting here meant culling through my stash of haiku, designing the pages, getting the plates made for printing, selecting the colors… and for good measure I always thoroughly clean my shop first. The calendar pieces take up every available space and then some, so every extraneous thing in here gets stored until I’m done. You can see my previous calendars 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.
