Midnight Haiku

I finally finished the little book. And I learned a few things along the way. The hemp fiber paper, as you can see, absorbs color in a very nice way. The paints I mainly used were liquid Dye-na-flow on wet paper. Hemp paper is not strong, but it tears with a lovely fuzzy edge. You have to stitch into it carefully to avoid big holes, but if you want holes, they are easy to make. I like the paper very much despite its delicate constitution. Next time I think I will try a Japanese binding using individual sheets rather than sewn signatures.

The book is about 2 ½ inches square by about ¾ inch deep. There are 6 signatures of 6 pages each. I bound them by the sewing over tapes method, and the tapes were made from some marbled tissue paper, folded into quarter inch tapes. The cover is covered on the inside with more of the marbled paper, and the outside is more painted hemp paper with beads. No big surprise there. I put beads on everything.

I have been reading many books about journaling, and making journals, and making visual journals, and all the other variations that are all the rage right now. And what I have come to discover about myself is that while I like looking at the journals, I am not terribly interested in reading them, and I am even more disinterested in jotting something personal down where others might read it. However, sometimes writing things down is quite good therapy. In this book, I did write about a particular period of time that warranted some serious retrospection/introspection, and I got around the privacy issue by writing it so completely illegibly that three days later even I could not figure out what it said. So here is the little book called Midnight Haiku, accompanied by several shots of my paint-encrusted fingernails. Bonus!