Day 50-Hair-on Cowhide Journal & Photo Book

Another of my favorite hair-on cowhide journals. This one has 6 black photo pages spread through the book as well.

I love the feel of this kind of leather. I always find myself stroking the hair, like petting a short-haired dog. This one is a brindle, black/brown/beige mix. Bone beads decorate the longstitch binding on the spine and a nice dark brown mulberry paper wraps the pages as an end paper.

Day 49 - Chili Peppers - A "Telephone" Book

This is yesterday's book, but I didn't have time to photograph and post it. Yesterday was one of those awful "working on store taxes" days. Can you spell h-a-t-e-f-u-l?  So I needed to do a book that was basically "quick-and-dirty" simple. And this was. But it also turned out to be more fun than I thought. And it's one of those ideas that stretches the idea of "what is a book?"

Remember when you were a kid and used to make a "telephone" out of a couple of paper cups or tin cans and a string? And then you put one can to your ear and listened fascinated as your friend talked into the can on the other end and the sound actually traveled down the string? Well, this is a "telephone" book.

I took two empty Rotel Diced Tomatoes and Green Chiles cans--great chili fixin's--and a piece of good nylon cord. Drilled holes in the can and tied the cord through on one end. I printed out a great chili quotation from the novelist Margaret Cousins. I punched the words out with a tag punch, cut out a few chile pepper shapes from red and green paper and threaded them all onto the cord then tied on the other can. And now it's a book.

The quotation reads, "Chili is not so much food as a state of mind. Addictions to it are formed early in life and the victims never recover. On blue days in October, I get this passionate yearning for a bowl of chili, and I nearly lose my mind."  ~Margaret Cousins

Day 48 - Words Are...

As a writer, I love the power of words. And the precision. They can be tools of healing or weapons of destruction. They can caress, wound, tease, kill, give hope, and leave despair.

This little book is about the power of words. The structure is an X-book with pockets, a simple folded structure made of one sheet of paper for the inside and another small piece for the cover. In the pockets, I've placed slips of paper with words... each about an aspect of what words are and can do, words like silky, pointed, far-reaching, liquid, angry, shackles, magic.

I like this book even more than I expected to. I plan to make this exact book again, but larger, with better paper and a bit more care and precision. And with more time to think about exactly what will go inside.

Day 47-Another Leather Journal

Nothing earth shaking or original today. Another pretty little leather journal with longstitch binding. A nice chestnut-colored cowhide and beautiful Arches Text Wove hand-torn paper pages. The end papers are a gorgeous beige/brown leaf print. The book closes with a strap that wraps around and is secured with an antler button.

This will definitely sell.

Day 46-Gambler Tobacco Book

Here's another "saw it in the store" book. An empty box of Gambler Rolling Tobacco seemed just the perfect size. All I had to do was cut the box open and remove the top and bottom, fold pages into signatures and stitch them in. The spine stitching seemed loose so I turned that problem into a win with some decorative knotting on the spine. I added some chain-weave cord for tying it shut.

And since I wanted to make a point opposite to what the the tobacco box stands for, I added a copy of one of the wonderful cigarette Death Cards to the front--a skeleton and the caption "This Joker was a smoker"--as well as two more full size cards inside the front and back covers. It's a nice fat little book with approx. 175 leaves (350 pages) of white text paper. It feels nice in the hand.

Day 45-Elkskin Mini-Journal

A nice little salable journal today. I'll probably be doing less of the experimental stuff in the next month and more stuff like this--a nice clean little book that people will pay me for. That's because I have a craft show coming up the weekend of April 10. And not nearly enough inventory to fill my 6 feet of table.

Anyway, this is a compact little mini-journal, 3"x3 1/2" x 3/4" thick. The leather is a fabulous butter-soft elkskin I found in a thrift store, of all places. The cover wraps over the front and a thong tie wraps around three times before tucking into itself to hold the book closed. A nice cream-colored 70 lb paper makes 72 leaves (144 pages) and it has a liner of dark brown mulberry paper.

Day 44-Chinese News Brush Book

This is kind of a silly little book, but I wanted to learn how to do it. It's called a brush book, because it looks and feels a lot like a paint brush. To learn this structure, I used a couple of sheets of Chinese newspaper I've had sititng around for a few years. I love the graphic quality of it.

In a brush book, basically strips of paper folded in half are held together by two other folded pieces of paper that provide the sort of hinge. I can see stretching this structure to accomplish new things.

Day 43-Route 66-Coptic Binding

I should have posted this book yesterday. I did finish it then, but because it is partially glued, it needed to spend some time under weights so it would lie flat and I could photograph it.

This idea sprang from a Route 66 vinyl sticker we sell in our store. I used the stickers on the front and back and it also provided the template for cutting out the boards for the covers and the pages. Now that was tedious! I kept thinking "Die Cutter. Die Cutter!" first I tried cutting the pages with scissors, but they were just plain ragged. I finally ended up using an Xacto knife and cutting them in piles of 4-5 pages at a time. As a result, the edges are not perfectly uniform as they would be using a die cutter. But they're really not too bad, if I do say so myself.

The binding for this book is the single-needle Coptic stitch. It's a binding where the stitching is exposed on the spine. It enables the book to lie completely flat when opened. This little book measures roughly 3 1/2" square.

Day 42-Miniature Tied Binding Book

I found this structure today in Alisa Golden's wonderful book, "Making Handmade Books: 100 Bindings, Structures & Forms." It's a very simple binding, but I'd never seen it before. Basically, you just fold the pages in half, slide a thread or cord into the fold, then glue the folded page closed. You stack up all these glued shut pages and tie the protruding threads one to the next using square knots.

The binding came out looser than I expected, so I tied more knots at the top and bottom to help pull the pages together a bit more. Since there's a lot of knot tying, making this book could be a sort of meditation. I'll make more like this, in different sizes.