Week Thirty Two - Robots!

This has a hard cover spine. I've been trying to do more of them and make them better. This one I decided to screen print on the cover for fun. A robot happened to be the creature I felt like drawing that day. A working man robot.

Week Thirty One - Reuse

This week I taught a half day kids camp and one of the things we did was make our own paper. This is the single signature book we made from the hand made paper with a book cloth cover.

Week Thirty - Casing

Instead of having the pages seen to their cover, I made 2 single signature books that fit inside a hard cover case that can be tied closed. Next time I would like to put a little bit of elastic inside the case to hold the books but so you could still remove them if you wanted.

Week Twenty Nine - Getting Fancy

Using a long stitch and a kettle stitch, I did a more decorative stitching on this book. This is my second attempt at curving the stitching. The template for this stitching gets abused during the making of the book and it takes forever but is well worth it in the end.

Week Twenty Eight - Joker

This book is all about it's cover. I wove together two different decorative papers then put a medium over it to make it more durable. The colors are perfect for the joker.

Week Twenty Seven - Experiment

This book is another version of my cereal box book that I have been working on. I'm trying to perfect this style of book. This time I put the decorative paper on the outside and the cereal box on the inside. I painted the outside with a gel medium to protect it and make it more durable. I created more of a design with the stitching as well. This book does not have tape around the edges of the cover but that may change later. I think I will make this my next sketch book to see how it uses.

On the inside I added marbled paper that I recently made in a class I took of Kathy Steinsberger's

Week Twenty Six - Chained

Well we are now half way through the year and this is my halfway book. This book doesn't have a full cover. It is sewn onto a band of paper and has a clay bead and a wax thread chain
for the closure. This book feels summery to me which is fitting since this week has been way too hot. I don't particularly like the summer.

Week Twenty Five - Exposed

I saw a book similar to this recently so I wanted to try it out. I found it interesting that the edges of the covers are raw so you can still see the book bored used to create a hard cover. I'm calling this book Exposed because you can see all the pieces: the stitching, knots, book bored and more. It feels like a very raw form of a book, not hiding what it is. I also have sewn in the end pages instead of gluing them in. Most the pages inside of this book are colorful and decorated.

Week Twenty Four - Hide Your Shit

This uses the method of a hard cover book but instead of pages you have a box. Great for hiding things, especially if you make the box look more like a book. For now I shall call it Hide Your Shit though I'm tempted to call it a coke box ;)

Week Twenty Three - Two Hands

This book is made from left over fabric from Art 2 Wear 2011. Everything is hand dyed and hand sewn. The pages are held inside with two bands, so when you fill up these pages you can take them out and slip in a new signature.

Week Twenty Two - Corded

This is a cord bound book and I used the extra cording from the spine to create a tie closure. The inside is all blank paper. This was my first attempt at a cord bound book so I'm not sure I did it correctly but I made it work.

Week Twenty One - Itty Bitty Love

This is a very small book with a very small snap clasp. This book has a single pamphlet and I typed a few lyrics from Metallica's Loverman song inside. I've had a lot of random songs stuck in my head recently and Loverman is what I listen to when I need to get a song out of my head.

Week Twenty - Mind of a Child

This book is sewn with a Coptic stitch. I know I've been doing that one a bit but this is different than the others. This one was done using two needles and the stitching on the outside has the look of a straight stitch on a sewing machine.

I called this one the mind of a child because the inside is made up of paste paper done be children in a summer camp taught.

Week Nineteen - Bite Me

This book Is bound with a Coptic stitch and has a clay cover. I made the cover during camp with the kids. The prompt was faces so I used this rectangle slab to demo how to make facial features. I liked how it turned out so I put 3 holes in it and decided it should be part of the book challenge.

Week Eighteen - Quiling

This book is sewn together using a Coptic stitch. The cover is made by Quiling thin strips of paper into different shaped and gluing them together. After I created the cover I dipped it in resin to give it more stability.

Week Seventeen - Double Barrel

So this week has been crazy and I had no idea what to do for my book a week. It finally came to me yesterday at the end of my day off.

A bunch of us were hanging out at a friends farm house and when we go down there we usually go shooting at targets on the side a hill. I picked up some of the casings and thought they world be perfect to incorporate into a book and also displayed well the week I've been having.

I used 4 casing from a shotgun for the cover and one 30-30 casing on the back cover. The 30-30 works perfectly to hold a normal BIC pen and I attached it with the headband stitch from last week. I figured I'd try the headband again and found I still don't care for it but it only took me two tries this time.

Week Sixteen - Nevermore

This book is sewn together with a coptic stitch. After the book was sewn, the headband, in purple thread, was sewn on. This was my first time doing a sewn headband on a coptic book and I must admit that I don't think I will ever do it again. It was quite frustrating and it took me three tries to get it right. I just don't think the headband is my thing.

Week Fifteen - Tanning

The cover of this book is a scrap piece of leather that I have cut straight. The inside is blank paper and paste paper pages. I titled this book "Tanning" as a play on words referencing the leather and the sun. It has a beer bottle cap as its closure that has a smiling sun on it.

Week Fourteen - Stars

This book uses folded squares glued back to back to create a book that opens into a star. I used scraps of paste paper for the pages and cover.

Hungry?