Beads, Buddha, and Bondaweb

It's time for Puget Sound Book Artists' second members' exhibit, and I just finished getting my books photographed and documented and jpegs sent on their merry way. Here are my three entries. The first book, Journey, is small, about 3"x3" bound by sewing over tapes. Remember the mess I had trying to sew over that overspun sari yarn? Well, I gave up and took that little book apart, and started over, sewing over nice, well-behaved Ultrasuede, and this is the result. The cover is made from brown grocery bag, one of my favorite papers to embellish, and beaded (of course). I like the way it turned out.

The parts of the pages that look painted, if you are curious, is actually bondaweb, painted and then cut into shapes and ironed onto the black hemp paper. The fun part of this book was the stitching, because each stitch shows on the reverse side of the page as well, so I had to place each bondaweb design so that the stitches would make some kind of sense on both sides of the page. It was an interesting experiment that I will for sure try again.

The next two books are maze fold formats. When Mr. B's brother Mike died a few years ago, he left stacks of etchings printed on lovely paper that I just could not bear to send to the recycle bin. I have begun using those repurposed prints in my own work, and these next two books are part of that series. I have blogged about both books before (here). I did finally finish the cover for the one I call Rain, as well as add a bit to one of the pages.