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?

Week Thirteen - Belly dance

This book has a hard cover spine so you can not see the stitching. It requires quite a bit of measuring which is why it's not my favorite to make. I prefer to free hand and eyeball most of my books. It was a lot of fun to make though, mainly because of the piece in the front cover. It's an object I found a while ago while working at camp. It reminds me a lot of a belly dancer, hence the title.

Week Twelve - Altered

This book is made from pages of an altered book I had started but never finished. I decided randomly, while sitting in a large pile of art stuff, to take some of the pages out of the old book and re-sew them. I did a Stab binding which I'd compare to a blanket stitch in fibers. I used laminating sheets as the cover and ribbon for the binding. Every page in it is different.

Week Eleven - Celebration

Week II: I made a celebration book!  It was intended to celebrate week 11 but it turned out that I  only had 10 candles so we can call it a belated celebration for week 10. 

I improvised on stitches I already knew since I hadn't ever sewn objects into a binding before this. 

I like the way it came out and if I do this again I'll have to put in more candles (and larger ones) so they make a complete circle.

Week Ten - The Accordion

I have decided that I am going to try to make a different style book each week for a while.  To start this I made an accordion fold book with a second piece in the center that is going in the opposite direction.  For the main accordion piece, I created a collage on one side with pictures from a National Geographic.  The other side I decorated with abstract scribbles.  The center piece is made by folding a long piece of tracing paper and then making slits so it can be woven through the main piece.  The way the tracing paper was folded created pockets, so I put an artist trading card in each pocket.  The artist trading cards are made by multiple different people.

Only 42 weeks left in the year!

Week Nine - More Books

I'm not really sure what to say about this book but that it was just something that happened while messing around with materials.  I love how it came out though.

Week Eight - Triangles

This book is made by folding a long piece of paper in to equilateral triangles (or as close as I can to that).  There are 11 triangles in all and when gluing the two ends together you get a small, triangular book that can be opened in many direction.  Before folding, I left one side of the paper blank and I covered the other side with different newspapers.  After folding and gluing, I painted the front of the book black.