a flicker of forest

Unpacking the Found Papers Book

... presented as post-hoc rationalisations, these thoughts here in fact came well before yesterday's post. Well - thoughts? Hm, not quite - some hand, brain, eye coordinations which led to some sustained exercises in general craftiness...

[some spillover from the day seems to be going on: writing conference papers is what I've been doing over the past few days, and it looks as if academic practice translates into blog posts, my apologies: this is distinctly wafty... as in fact the paper still is... but bear with me]

A book format such as the loosely, with a string, strung together palm leaf booklet [talked about here] seemed much better than merely a two-dimensional canvas for the found papers.

The string acquired some beads - paper beads, made out of some of the found papers too.
I came across paper beads first on etsy. They are so simple to make and can be customised into different shapes, but more importantly colour-coordinated sooo easily: just use the same found papers, coloured papers, and hey presto: there's your perfect accompaniment.

Paperbeads

An instruction for the beads is here. They are cut strips of paper, rolled tiedly together on a skewer or similar, then fixed with glue/ gloss medium to acquire some strength. And that's it.

The cover is some left over postcards, covered in more found papers - some of the yellow envelopes I got from Australia are perfect - there's some stamping, some addressing and general texture. Again, glued on with decoupage medium, covered with decoupage medium and thoroughly dried it's pretty sturdy and looks generally undestructable (though that's deceptive I suppose).

Inside cover with title

Title and signature go inside the cover. It's rather conventional, as far as collage titles go, but good nonetheless: This one is called Moin Olle: Sondervig. Slupsk - Taken from some text on the collage, and the two most outlying place names from the map on the back.

Half the postcard format is perfect for a good cover of the booklet.

This observation leads to the final, most important (?), point on the format... but that'll take a bit longer, so it'll have to wait til tomorrow...

Alternative supports

I've been receiving a few more envelopes stuffed with found papers - more on the content of these in one of the next posts, and a big thank you to those who have been sending material along!

Since my little lunchtime conversation on 'what's to do', I've been thinking around these collages from allover. And... kind of got stuck with content. Shifted sideways (mentally at least), and started thinking about form - one of my stumbling blocks had been the two dimensional support: canvas, paper. It seemed far too unified, homogenous and definite for the idea of getting incidentals from different people in different locations.

One of the recent posts I really enjoyed was Lindsay's report from her bookmaking course, and the concertina artist book she made around the word 'reiteration'. I had been collecting ideas on customising and making sketchbooks for some time (thought they haven't progressed further than a draft state so far).

So, some concerted googling and asking around - thank you Lindsay! - unearthed a couple of simple bookmaking ideas. Unsurprisingly, many on crafty sites for projects with kids.

I had a go at some simple designs from Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord's site http://makingbooks.com

And ended up with these three ones here: A palm leaf book in the front, the hotdog booklet back right, and an accordion book back left.



This is them unfolded:



And, I must admit that my favourite is the palm leaf: as with the accordion design, it can be folded flat, but in addition, the order of leaves can be swapped around (provided the cord is long enough), and it can easily be taken apart and reassembled.



So: next step: size, actual support material and so on and so on...