A Book a Day? What's Up With That?


Hi, and welcome to this year-long project. So what's this all about and how did it happen, you might ask. In mid 2007, artist Noah Scalin decided to make a skull out of anything he could find, every day for a year. It stretched him in ways he never imagined, as an artist, a writer and a person. His experience turned into a blog that went viral, and then a book.

Others have picked up on the idea: 365 Hearts, 365 Masks, 365 Bears drawn on a cellphone, 365 paper napkin mustaches.
I wanted to play, too, and I chose books. I love books, I know a bit about making books (thanks to my talented book-maker sister, Marilyn Worrix), and they're broad enough in definition to give me a lot of creative leeway.

The whole point is not really the books. The idea is to stretch myself in many ways as an artist and a person, to set up a discipline, stick with it and see what that teaches me.

I hope you'll join with me and follow along on the journey chronicled here, and let me know what you think.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Day 22-Welcome to Las Vegas

This book is tiny--only 1 1/2" in diameter. I wanted to try something else very small and I've been playing around with the idea of poker chips for awhile.

The covers of this little book are two souvenir poker chips I bought at the Gambler's General Store in Las Vegas some time ago. Using them as a template, I cut out 40 circles of paper in four different colors for the pages. I sandwiched the pages between the two chips, clamped them all together with a couple of bulldog clips, and drilled a whole through all the layers just inside the edge on one side.

I cut a length of thick, 12 gauge copper wire. I hammered one end of the wire with a riveting hammer to get it to flare enough that it would not pass through the hole in the top chip. Then I threaded the unflared end through the whole book, trimmed the back end of the wire quite short, set the thing upside down on an anvil, and flared the other end of the wire. I now had a rivet closing the book. The rivet is loose enough that the chips and pages can turn around it, flaring open so you can get at the pages.

I think this little book would be a great card marker for a poker player. And it has the advantage of being a real book, so during a break you can make notes in it about the plays or anything else.



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