The Meadow

The Meadow is a book about travel. It has a painted canvas cover and a photograph paperbutton of some grasses in a magical mountain meadow I often visit in Penland, North Carolina. 

Travel is something I always look forward to... and engage in with a sort of dread. I suppose we face each day with an element of the unknown, but travel magnifies the uncertainty.. increases anxiety, and makes me feel vulnerable. Yet, travel to some exotic Wonderland, some Shangrila, some Elysian field is at the top of my list of things to do... and my favorite stories and myths involve travel...  I love to daydream of travel, and I plan trips (for some future day) all the time. 

Inside: marbled paper and a pastepaper pocket with paperbuttons

When you travel you need to have a journal with lots of pockets for keeping all of those ticket stubs, restaurant receipts, business cards, and whatever else you might discover... When I'm in Penland, I collect lots of pieces of mica. They sparkle along the paths and in the dirt and grass everywhere. I collect the fallen laurel flowers and the beautiful colored fall leaves. I collect the dirt and mud. I make the mud into a paste and paint with it. I grind the grasses and put them in my handmade paper. I sprinkle mica dust in my pastepapers. The Meadow is a book for collecting and recording all the wonderful things to find on a journey to a new place and is my book for Week 17.

Kathy

Ivy Patch

Week 16's Book of the Week is Ivy Patch. It's another enameled copper covered book with coptic binding like Week 6, Lilac Creek. Another twin.. similar but not the same.... It has a tiny pearl button from some baby clothes I used to wear. And the cover reminds me of an ivy patch.

This is the green-tinted version of the purple-tinted Lilac Creek. Inside, some of the pages are marbled paper in shades of greens. It's spring in the mountains where I'm staying, yesterday was Earth Day, and the leaves and ivy patches are lush and damp from the mountain mist.. and quick rains.. In the mountains it rains nearly every day. The rivers are big now and the puddles are full of maple tree pollen, dogwood flowers, and azalea petals.

Like it's twin, this little book has handmade paper pages, but this time I used abaca paper I mixed in the paper beater for over 8 hours. It is lovely... smooth... and translucent... and crisp all at once. It feels very new.

When the sun hit the paper, the pages seemed to glow and speak with their own voice. I don't have the words for this book right now. Perhaps if I were a poet I'd know what to write in this tiny book, Ivy Patch. 

Kathy

Week 15: Wow

The book for week 15 is titled Wow.

Wow is Mom written upside down...

It's a Coptic binding with a headband on covers of putty and glued on pieces of cut mat board, then painted with acrylics and polyurethane.  No deep meaning about Wow, huh? Just a silly blank book to write things that make you say wow.

Marbled paper makes me say wow!

And one really big wow of our world? the sun rising and setting every day... Apollo crossing the sky in his chariot of gold...

What are the things that make you say Wow!?

Kathy

Week 14: The Book of Closures

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” 

Revelation 22:13 

  “Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.” - Joseph Joubert 


“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." Henry David Thoreau


  The book for Week 14 is The Book of Closures. It's really not that deep... just a book of closure samples for the last class of a bookarts class I'm teaching titled Covers and Closures. So this is it.. reminds me of some Big City apartment door... half a dozen locks stacked one above the other... 

   So, what's on the menu? There are two ribbons tied; a button and ribbon or a button and elastic cord; two beads on a string through a loop; a fore-edge flap with a rivet and ribbon; a wooden pin (the end of a chopstick) on a ribbon through a book cloth loop; two buttons and a ribbon; a leather thong with a loop; and a magnet and metal plate. Sure, there are more choices besides these eight for closures, but I ran out of board... How would you create your closure?

   Open the plain board covers and you see a paste painted Tyvek hinge and the remnants of the closures, especially the magnet and metal piece which are inset and glued at the bottom of the board. There goes that "snap" again!
   One last closure completes the set, and that's a paper wrapper with a fore-edge flap with a window, a loop, and a wooden pin (also known as a cocktail skewer). So, if the closure needs to match the content, I imagine a book with this closure might have a lot of pictures of mellon balls...

   Enjoy all of your endings as much as your beginnings.. which are really all the same thing, right?
Kathy