Book #071 - Lucky Again

I made another one of the "Lucky" books from a couple of days ago. This time I retrieved my foil papers and made the five little books as originally planned. I like the way it turned out, but have forgotten that special scanner setting that eliminates the weird stripes when scanning metallics. So the book covers aren't really all stripey like that. The needle threader is just part of the image as scanned. It might be a good place to attach a four leaf clover charm, if I can find one.

Book #069 - Lucky

A simple idea whose execution turned out to be more complicated than expected. The cover is a scan, (two scans actually) of the outside and inside of an old needle case. I printed them separately - so far so good. Then I cut them out individually - not hard. Then I put them together back to back - also not hard once I realized that the thing isn't quite symmetrical and the pieces have to go together a certain way.

The original plan was to create 5 tiny books using images of the red and green foil needle holders as covers, and to glue them in their designated places. Well, foil is just too hard to scan and print; it looked gross. I have some nice foil papers - at the studio. But I was working at home. So I decided instead to make the white pages you see in the picture. That went fine until I stapled them to the inner piece of the cover (so that the staples wouldn't show on the outside, right?) and then tried to assemble the whole thing. The thickness of the %@#?! staples threw everything off and I mean everything. The pages didn't fit in the inner cover and the inner cover didn't fit in the outer cover. So I tried to trim it just a little...and then just a little more...and of course things just got worse and worse.

Well, that's the story of today's book. We haven't seen the last of it; I'm going to make another one using the tiny books with foil covers. And I'll gather 5 little stories about luck. I'd love to hear your story, if you have one to share.

The state of the book of the states

Some folks have asked about how I plan to handle certain very "shapely" states. Here's some of what I've been thinking.

I am depending on "territorial waters" to make Hawaii (and Florida?) easier. Territorial waters can extend from about 13 up to 200 miles out into the ocean, depending on which standard you choose. Thus Hawaii ends up looking sort of like a dill pickle. I saw a book in the shape of a pickle once...

I have an idea for Michigan, but I'm not telling just yet. Again, the water might help.

Yes, Maryland will be a challenge, mostly because of that little skinny bit up at the top, which is sure to be fragile. I considered combining MD and WV, but then there's that little finger at the top of WV! Plus I really don't want to cheat that way. Well...more thought required.

I have to admit that many years ago on a road trip through Wyoming I commented to the driver that it was too bad they couldn't have thought of a more creative shape for their highway signs...like some states have signs in the shape of their...oh, yeah. Oops.

Book #063 - Idaho

You know, this state book idea is helpful for when I need inspiration, but making them is going to be tricky. I am having to enlarge my source materials to make reasonable sized books, and as I want them all to be at the same scale I have to take care to do the enlarging exactly the same each time. Then there's the distortion contributed by the particular projection of the source map, which becomes much more noticeable at the larger size. I'd better get a system figured out sooner rather than later if I don't want to do a bunch of the early states over.

Well, anyway - here's Idaho! It has a nice straight western boundary. Someone commented that Hawaii will be hard, but I think not; it borders only water, no other land masses. That'll be a piece of cakewalk in the park.

Book #061 - Washington

There are some days (like today) when I am busy with other things and have no burning ideas for a book. To get me through those days I am starting a set of little books in the shapes of the states. So that will take care of 50 days worth of books, at the end of which I will have a big map of books. They're to be very simple - pages and cover folded and stapled. Washington is hinged at the top, because that's a nice, almost straight line.

I'm having trouble getting a picture of yesterday's book. It really can't be scanned, and the camera is giving me kittens. But it will get done sooner or later.

Book #053 - 158.1MAN2009

Well, I had an entertaining excursion through a whole lot of websites, from the Library of Congress to Library Thing, and all because I thought it would be fun to assign a call number to today's home-made, totally personal Self-Help book. It's a little book of a sort that I make for myself from time to time, when I want to generate some new ideas for rumination and art.

I take some free art gallery directories that I pick up at the museum whenever there's a new one, and I cut them up into small strips which I fold and staple together in a cover. The cover of the day is another piece of the Gymboree box left over from Christmas. (It's almost gone, thank goodness. I don't like yellow that much.)

When the book/s is/are all done, I go through with some colored pencils and highlight words or phrases that catch my eye or mind. Usually it's something I find thought-provoking as a subject, but it can also be something or someone that I want to follow up on. It's important that the pages be small, so that a single word can seem like a big thing. And I try to pick out only one thing per page (discipline being its own reward) but that doesn't always work.

What I highlighted in this book:

theatrical
humor
landscapes of the psyche
primavera
seriously funny
systemic
2-building complex
conversations between
North Beeline Hwy.
bannock
la Villita
clsd sun
the intersection of Palace Avenue and Cathedral Place.
Alameda St.
dieties, and cosmic narratives
tango with cows
European manuscript illuminations
red brick
superstition freeway
center for land use interpretation
discrete anecdotes in the over-arching story
artist road
arbitrariness of boundaries between different cultural practices
private enjoyment
rich colors
elaborately decorative patterns
belles heures of the Duke of Berry
tribal art
public always welcome
SITE
Rita Banjeree
Tanyth Berkley
Angelo Filomeno
reconstructing identity
commodus
uncertainty principle
lost and found
restoration
mano

Book #047 - Tags and More Tags

Here's an assortment of little books made from shipping tags. From the top, going clockwise:

1. three tags taped together to make an accordion (or a screen?)
2. two tags with a paper spine glued on the short end, a small signature stapled in last
3. three tags tied together with one string - about as simple as it gets
4. the pages are stapled in the fold at the left, the other end of the tag makes a flap, and theres a button holding it shut through the hole
5. just like #2 but with the spine on a long side

center - tag folded in half, pages stapled in at left fold and the whole thing tied shut with the ends of the string

The strings can be used in a lot of ways: to hold the things shut, to attach embellishments or just to hang there and make it look tag-like.

Happy Presidents' Day.

Book #043 - Exercises in Asemic Writing

Asemic writing. It looks like writing, but you can't quite read it.

Today's book is more about the content than the construction, for a change. Asemic writing is writing that...isn't. It looks as if you should be able to read it but...you can't. It appears to make sense, but...no, it doesn't. Or does it? Here are some examples that I came up with for today's book with explanations of how they were done. If you want to read up on asemic writing you could start here.

The text above was made by slicing a printed page from a book and then reassembling the slices. In this case the cuts were made horizontally, through the center of the lines of type, so that the letters were split in two. Then the strips were mixed up and offset a bit - however it looked good - and glued back together. The whole thing was then scanned and tidied up in Photoshop; all the little leftover bits being removed.

The two on the left were made the same as the above example, except that the strips were cut vertically so that the the individual letters were preserved and recognizable; the combinations of strips resulted in random mixing of parts of words, creating something that looks like our alphabet but not a familiar language. To the right, circles and rectangles cut (punched, actually) from some pages were glued onto a whole page, breaking up the print in a completely random way.


And finally, the above example was done in Photoshop, using the same principles as described above. I created a line of test and then cut and copied and reassembled it. Lastly I used some shape-distorting tools on it.

You know you can enlarge the images by clicking on them, right?

Book #041

This book was done at 9PM. It truly was!

Then I started looking for a blog widget that counts down days. And now it's 2:17AM!

So here is a scan of the front of today's book. I know, it looks like a square of paper, but it is a book front. The pages are a cream colored card stock, staggered as on Day #030, and the covers are this brown and pink dotted paper that I can't seem to get enough of these days. The whole thing went together in about 15 minutes. Nice book.

Book #032: The Path

Full title:
'The Path - Travesty #1 on the work of the Brothers Grimm.'
This is the first of I'm not sure how many so-called Travesties. I'll get into that more as time goes on. Making this tiny little thing was an ordeal, since I had forgotten everything I used to have in my memory about imposition - how to lay out multiple book pages on a single sheet of paper (both sides) so that they are in the right reading order when the book is assembled. Not that right reading order matters much with a book that starts out,

"Once upon a time," murmured intentions, the path.

Anyway, it took me almost three hours to get it right, but now I have a good template so the rest will go faster. I also found a very nice free font called Erasmus. I do love fonts. There are a lot of freebies here, and it would be worth checking them out just for the names...better than local bands.

Book #028

Oh, I had a great evening in the studio: made good progress on a round robin book project that I'm horribly behind in, did some samples for the Third Friday in February and made this book.

This is two books in one, or maybe more like two books in one and a half. The cover (which is cut from an old hanging file folder...beautiful brown paper) is in three parts and binds two sets of pages. I think this will eventually have to have a two-part story, or something told from two points of view, or things happening simultaneously in parallel universes. The black pages will be interesting. Which makes me think that it would be interesting to make a book like this with daytime pages and nighttime pages and tell the story of the same place at two different times. Too many possibilities...

Book #017

This was a little different: the book construction was minimal - pages and a cover stapled together. Most of the work (and the fun!) was in the content. I don't know what made me decide to do it this way. I guess I just felt like smearing paint around some more. I used some mailroom supply rubber stamps that I got at the dollar store ages ago. They came in stacked sets of three, self inking, and they are almost spent. But the words are great: cancelled, confidential, urgent, air mail, original, duplicate, confirmation...and two more I can't remember just now. Not 'completed', that's another stamp. Oh well - it's not all that urgent is it?

So, I drew (ultrafine Sharpie) and then colored (my old Prang watercolors from my childhood, believe it or not) a little picture for 7 of the stamps. It was very flow-of-consciousness...a nice way to spend an evening.

My friend Lena came to the studio yesterday evening. With the holidays and snow and all, I hadn't seen her in a long time, and it was really good to visit. She brought me three very nifty things that she bought online ('cause today's my birthday); I'll post some pictures of them later on. We had an inspiring conversation about life, crafting, stuff. I always feel inspired after a visit with Lena. And then about 10pm we went out for pie and coffee. I think pie and coffee is one of my favorite little rituals. It meant a lot to my dad; he loved his pie. He was a traveling salesman, although with a very small territory so he wasn't ever away, except maybe one night a month when he went to Bellingham. Name a city/town in Western Washington and he could tell you where to get good pie.