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, July 21, 2011

Book 174-A Recycled Children's Book Journal-"Danger in the Desert"

Here's a new kind of recycled book projec for me, a children's book that is literally upcycled into a different book/journal.

For my faithful followers who have wondered where I was the last couple of days... I repeat. I AM NOT QUITTING. I have been working on books, I just could not post them for a couple of reasons. So today I'm posting the last two days and will post today's book later tonight.

Anyway, I've been wanting to do some of these journals using old recycled book covers for awhile. I finally got to the Salvation Army store in town and found a few kids books I think will be great. Here's the first.

I carefully cut out the book block and cut down the center of the spine to separate the cover boards. I left enough of the spine paper to fold over and glue down for a clean edge, then lined the inside with card stock. I cut the pages to fit, drilled holes through the whole thing and stitched it together with waxed jute cord in a double spiral (like a cross-stitch). This binding works better for thinner, softer books, I found. This book does open flat, but it's sometimes hard to get it to close perfectly. The pages tend to move out of alignment. But not too badly.

I do like this and plan to do more of these recycled covers with other stitching.




2 comments:

  1. I like that term upcycled. Nice!
    I can see why with the thicker hard covers that this binding might move a bit, but it looks nice. :)

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  2. I am very interested in the LOOSE stab bindings because I dont care for books with the traditonal stab bindings, they never open well for me. Interested in your experiments to make this work well. And I am an old children's book fan, so like this and the Pooh.

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