365: Make a Book a Day: Book 138 - Filtered Thoughts

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.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Book 138 - Filtered Thoughts - Coffee Filter Hand-Made Book

I will readily admit that many of the books I've made for this challenge come from simply walking through the store, through the kitchen, through the house, looking for something, anything, that I can make into a book. The glow that comes from making one I really like (like yesterday's) fades quickly into the morass of "Oh, that was yesterday; what am I going to make today?"

So tonight, I was wandering through the house and ended up in the kitchen. Checked out some cereal boxes, some candy boxes (did that), some wrappings. Then I spied a stack of coffee filters. I've seen coffee filter books before so this seemed a natural. It took a bit of sitting staring at the things before this book came into focus in my mind. (I seem to do quite a lot of that sitting-staring-at-materials stuff.)

I cut the filters into four quarters. Then I made a cover out of brown card stock. I cut two strips from davey board for the spine and covered them with decorative tape. The book is stab stitched with waxed yellow cotton embroidery thread in a diamond pattern to mirror the diamond pattern in the tape.