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.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Day 83 - A Tape-Bound Journal

This is a binding I'd never heard of until today when I noticed a very brief reference to it in Shereen LaPlante's book "Cover to Cover," which was the first book on making books I ever owned. She describes the process as using paper bookmaker's tape to tape one page to the next, then tape the next one to that, and so on until you have a block.

Well, not only do I not own any paper bookmaker's tape, I'm not even sure I know what it is. But then I remembered that I DO have some very pretty Japanese decorative masking tape I bought last year on etsy. So I hauled out that envelope and set to work.

This is basically a variation on a perfect binding, but with tape instead of glue. The taping can be a little tricky to keep all the pages perfectly lined up. Since the tape shows inside each pair of pages, I varied the color and design of the tape from page to page, then added decorative elements with the tape to the cover and another piece of tape over the spine. Throughout the process, I burnished the tape very well with a steel burnisher, so I do think it would hold together for quite a while.

. It looks a little like a Christmas package, but I like it.




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1 comment:

  1. RachelApril 21, 2011 at 8:36 PM

    Very nice. I love that you are finding and using things from your stash. that is exactly what I need to be doing, but right now is not the time for something a day. Still, hoping the time WILL come.

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