Where to begin... on a personal note I've just returned from a week teaching at Penland School of Crafts in the North Carolina mountains... Like sometimes happens in life, it was a perfect moment in time.
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| Quiet after the snowfall |
Ten book arts students (men and women of all ages and backgrounds), my assistant Elizabeth and I gathered for introductions at the Penland Books and Paper studio Sunday night, October 28, 2012.
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| Through this door... so much fun! |
The class was titled
Once Upon a Time and included both book making techniques and writing.. with a few surface design/illustration techniques squeezed in... The first day we painted pastepapers... and wrote a batch of collaborative
zines based on the process of an
Exquisite Corpse. Zines are small self published editions of stories, articles, or other content-related information that are simply bound (such as by folding, staples, or pamphlet stitch) and reproduced by photocopier. An
Exquisite Corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is assembled as a
collaboration where each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence. For our zines, everyone started their own zine then passed it to the right for their neighbor to add the next page of the story. With each new page, the zines were passed to the right and the stories continued by the next person.. until all 12 zines were done. I covered my collection of the 12 zines with pastepaper, sewed them with the pamphlet stitch, and strung them onto a macrame cord of waxed linen thread as this week's Book of the Week...
Fresh Catch!
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Fresh Catch of zines
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The titles of the 12 zines of
Fresh Catch are: 1.
Once Upon a Time, 2.
The Journey, 3.
Penland in a Snowstorm, 4.
Trees Stand Naked, 5.
Been Zine, 6.
The Little Old Lady at the End of the Road, 7.
24 is My Lucky Number, 8.
Stretching My Brain!, 9.
Craven Potters Crack Pottery, 10.
A Clear Midnight, 11.
Margin of Error, and
12.
The Night of the Enchanted Guillotine.
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| The Night of the Enchanted Guillotine... |
The zine Once Upon a Time begins...
'One night while
Luann was
sleeping...
She woke to a
shadow moving beneath
her bed.
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| Page 2 & 3 of the zine Once Upon a Time |
'...but the shadow
was just her
house slipper.
Now that she was
awake at 3 am,
there was no going
back to sleep.
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| Page 4 & 5 of the zine Once Upon a Time |
'...For she realized there
was only one
slipper and
so the other
must be
on the foot
of the one
legged monster
in the closet.
And so she
asked him
to give it
back and
he did if
she gave him
her pillow so
she did and
he turned into a
prince.
THE END'
So zines can be a bit fishy.. because they are usually fast and 'dirty.' That's why I strung them up and call the piece Fresh Catch!
My grateful thanks to Elizabeth, Sarah, Martha Sue, Louis, Kate, Pat, Savanah, John, Mary Ann, Jean, and Liz for your collaboration on this Book of the Week. It was an incredible week and I already miss you terribly!
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| Our Buladean... valley of gold |
Kathy
