Friday, January 18, 2013

Egyptian Brew Journal

In addition to making books, I also enjoy spending some of my free time brewing beer. It's a hobby I've only recently picked up, and when learning something new, I've always found it handy to keep detailed notes on what I'm doing. I've also been developing my baking skills, which I also want to take notes on. So I got the idea to make a brewing and baking journal.

But what to put on it, and what to make it out of? The Egyptians may not have been the first to brew beer, but they were the biggest brewers of the ancient world. Wages were paid in bread and beer--the original two great tastes that taste great together. I had recently found a fabric scrap at the thrift store that I thought had a kind of pharaoh's headdress look to it, now all I needed was a good cover image.

This is where my pretty artist girlfriend came in. She too is a great fan of ancient Egypt, so she volunteered to draw something for me that I could use for a cover. After some brainstorming we decided on a tomb painting style wall depicting baking and brewing, drawn with colored pencil onto a nice red sand colored mi-tientes paper.

The result is quite lovely. I made covers out of it and used the cloth mentioned earlier for the spine, and glued in my long-stitched codex and dark brown crinkle paper end leaves.

Other details: I used fusible webbing to bind the cloth to its backing paper, a new technique for me, but I'm happy with the results. I also printed my own journal paper, which I've been doing for a while, but this paper has a nice triple-mountain pattern on the bottom, which gives it a nice pro looking quality.



Friday, January 11, 2013

Botanical Ceramics NW Design Book

This is a book I made for Christmas for my girlfriend's sister, who runs a home ceramics business.  She is forever doing new, creative things with clay, and I thought she might enjoy a design book to sketch new ideas in.  This book was built a lot like my last book, but of course is a completely different style.


The sparkly purple front cover (which, after taking these photos, I added the Botanical Ceramics logo in silhouette to) is made from one of my favorite book cover materials, a gift bag.  I also added some punk girl ribbon to spice it up a bit.


The back cover is the same material but no logo or ribbon.



The sewing is heavyweight hemp cord...


And the inside cover is an eggplant colored linen paper.  The drawing paper is again 80 lb. drawing paper cut to 18x12 and folded in half.

Map of America Sketchbook

This is a book I made for Christmas for my girlfriend's father, who is an artist and a map-maker at the USGS.  In that spirit, I thought a durable sketchbook he could draw in while taking the bus to work would be a nice gift, and found a plastic-covered map of the United States at Goodwill that I thought might make a nice cover.



I've never worked with this particular material for covers before, and it was harder to work than I thought.  The cover ended up with bubbles I wasn't able to work out, as the glue didn't adhere very well to the plastic covering.  The upshot to this is that it is very durable, water resistant and scuff resistant.



For the inside cover I used a nice blue damask patterned paper...


The pages are 18x12 80 lb. drawing paper (folded in half for a final page size of 9x12), cut to size from 18x24 original paper that I buy in bulk.


I learned a lot about my stitching technique using alternating colors for each section.  If you're not happy with your Coptic stitch, I recommend doing a black/white alternation.