Feeling creatively refreshed

Over the past year, the linenlaid&felt studio has been a busy place. I've been working on new projects, experimenting with new ideas, and learning new techniques. And while I've spent lots of time making, I've spent less time blogging. But I'm aiming to change that, because I just have so much to share. 

Embroidery sampler on handmade paper by Claudia Lee.

I teach several bookbinding classes and workshops each semester in Nashville, but I've also decided to take more classes myself. Over the past year, I've brushed up on my papermaking skills, tried my hand at making marbled paper, learned some traditional bookbinding techniques, and made handmade paper boxes. 

Each of these classes have helped to give me a new perspective on my work, and I plan to write about them all in more detail. But for now, I want to start off with the most recent workshop that I took. 

A work-in-progress: The handmade paper box I made during Claudia Lee's workshop.

I recently spent a weekend with Claudia Lee learning to make an elaborate box out of handmade paper. Working with materials I use on a daily basis — handmade paper and waxed linen thread — I made something quite different. My box (once it's complete) will be a place to store all of my bookbinding tools, elaborately decorated with embroidery and collage. 

Despite an entire weekend of stitching, my handmade box is still a work in progress. But I truly enjoyed the process of selecting color schemes, creating small compositions on each panel, and hand-sewing detailed patterns. Each surface of the box (including the bottom and the inside), is embellished with some sort stitching or design. It's a time-intensive, detail-oriented, and tedious undertaking — which happens to be right up my alley. 

Handmade paper boxes by Claudia Lee.

At the end of the workshop, I felt invigorated, inspired, and creatively refreshed. And really, what could be better than that?  

Handmade & Bound

The first annual Handmade & Bound book arts festival is just a few days away!  I've been looking forward to this event for months.  It was one of the first things about Nashville I found out about once we knew we'd be moving to town, and I sent in my vendor application before we'd even started packing to leave Virginia. 

I thrilled to be living in a city with a book arts community, and I can't wait to be a part of this event.  In addition to the various vendors selling handmade books and zines, there will be workshops and demos in bookmaking, papermaking, and printmaking, as well as a film screening, a gallery exhibit, live music and food trucks.  

Handmade & Bound Nashville

September 30 and October 1

Watkins College of Art, Design & Film

Friday, September 30

6:30 pm: Opening reception of "Encoded Structures: Interpreting the Story," a juried gallery show of artists' books and zines

8:00 pm: Free Screening of “$100 and a T-shirt," an award-winning documentary on the culture of zine making

Saturday, October 1

Vendors:

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Vendor booths exhibiting and selling artists’ books, zines, small press publications, and other handmade bookish things.

Demonstrations:

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Goldsmith Press Demonstration; print your own DIY bag

10:00 am – 11:00 am and 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Brown Dog Bindery Demonstration; Jennifer Knowles-McQuistion will demonstrate how wooden books are carved, burned, and bound

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Gilded Leaf Bindery Demonstration; book restoration, fine bindings, blank journals, and gold tooling

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Pamphlet Stitch Books for Kids with local printmaker and book artist Lesley Patterson-Marx

Workshops:

10:00 am to 11:00 am: Pixels, Print and Presence: How to Make the Most of Digital When It Comes to Print

This workshop is an introduction to web and digital assets for anyone from a DIY Zinester to Small Press publishers. 

10:00 am – 11:00 am: Findings & Bindings 

Use a discarded book, found papers both old and new, and a simple no-sew binding technique to create a one-of-a-kind handmade journal to house your creative notions.

11:00 am – 12:00pm: Zines with Kids & Teens

11:00 am – 12:00pm: Storytime for Children

Children can make paper finger puppets of the characters to take home.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: Miniature Accordion Popup Books

Artist Jennifer Knowles-McQuistion will lead participants through making a miniature hardback accordion book with pages that pop up, spill out, and burst from the folds. 

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: Toward A Self-Sufficient, Long-Lived Zine

Examine the nuts and bolts of what it takes to keep a serial zine alive and vital. 

1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Felt Sketchbook

Participants will design their book covers using felt and other materials, such as decorative papers, threads, and beads. Then they will assemble their sketchbooks, binding the books using posts and screws.

2:00 pm – 3:00 pm: The Art of Saying Something Worth Saving

Discussion will cover the pressure language undergoes when we seek to present it in a book arts project, and how words respond and rise to that challenge or collapse under the weight of that attention, and how we recognize it. 

3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Quadraflip or infinity card

Turning the pages of this structure changes their orientation and reveals hidden pages before taking you back to the beginning. 

3:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Open Mic Zine Readings

All day: Papermaking 

Book artist and instructor Annie Herlocker will guide you through pulling your own sheet of paper from pre-pulped materials.

Making paper by hand

I've been taking over the house once again with my latest creative project -- papermaking.  (Thankfully my husband doesn't seem to mind, and he even stepped in to take some photos of the process so I could share them here.)  

I met a local bookmaker, Laura, here in Nashville soon after moving to town.  We then met up for coffee to chat about books and new techniques we wanted to try.  We decided that papermaking should be our first project and we wasted no time with getting started.  We made these lovely lavender sheets of paper last week, and we've since made a new batch of raspberry-sherbet-colored paper and have several bags of paper pulp in my fridge prepared for our next papermaking adventure.  

The bowl above is filled with little torn-up scraps of paper leftover from making books.  For about a week, I collected all of the little bits of paper that were too small to be reused.  Then I soaked them in water for about 12 hours.  Then Laura and I blended the paper scraps into pulp using her smoothie maker that she donated to the papermaking cause ("the sacrificial blender," as my husband called it).  

Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the blended paper pulp this time.  You might expect it to look like a gross and gooey mess.  But it's surprisingly soft and has a really luxurious feel to it.  It's actually quite nice to dip your hands into it during the process.  

Next, we added our pulp to a large vat of water.  Then we'd dip our mould and deckle (made by Laura!) into the vat to pull a sheet of paper.  With each sheet I pulled, I loved seeing the assortment of speckles and flecks of paper that happened to make it onto the mould because they remind me of the books I'd made with those different decorative papers.  

After pulling the sheets, we'd press them from the mould onto pieces of cloth, and eventually set them out to dry in my living room.  (It's been much too humid to dry them outside.)  It took about a day for the sheets to dry completely.  Once dry, Laura and I got together again to gently peel our sheets of paper off of the cloths.  

And here's the end result:

We experimented with using different types of cloth to press our wet sheets of paper on to dry.  The textures of the cloth effects the final texture of the paper.  You can see an examples of the different textures below.  We used linen, felt, and cotton to achieve different textures.  The sheet on the left was pressed onto felt; the sheet in the center was pressed onto linen, and the sheet on the right was pressed to a wrinkly piece of cotton.  We also experimented by rolling wet sheets of paper onto plexiglass, which yielded an incredibly smooth texture. 

I love textured paper.  In fact, such textures are the namesake of my business: linenlaid&felt.  (You can read more about that in the FAQ section of my website.)  While commercially-made papers of these names are made to resemble the textures of these cloths, making paper by hand allowed for us to create these textures ourselves.  Laid paper refers to the lines impressed by certain types of papermaking molds, like those that I used in Italy.  

Both Laura and I have already put our new sheets of handmade paper to use.  I made two Italian longstitch journals last week with suede covers and pieces of our handmade paper as decorative accents inside.  It has been a while since I've made a book for myself.  I'm typically busy working on custom orders, books for my shop, or gifts for friends, so I decided to take the time to make a book just for me. 

The book on top is the one I've decided to keep.  Because these books have the suede straps that wrap the book and keep it shut, it will be the perfect portable book to keep with me to jot down notes on the go.  And as an added bonus, I'll always have an example of my work with me to show as a response to the blank stares I often get when I tell people that I'm a bookbinder.  The other book that I made (the one bound with lavender thread) is now for sale in my etsy shop.  

Laura kindly made a monogrammed bookmark for me using the paper that we made together.  She makes the most adorable miniature books and book jewelry, and she will also be selling her work at the Handmade & Bound festival in a few weeks.  I love seeing the little purple pages peeking out from the little book and knowing that our handmade paper is going to good use.  

Flashback Friday: Book with handmade paper cover

As part of the book arts class I took in Italy, my instructor, Eileen Wallace, also taught the basics of papermaking. I made the rust-colored paper used for the cover of this book. The guards wrapping the signatures of paper are also sheets of my handmade paper, only thinner than the piece used for the cover. The brown paper used for the pages came from a little shop in Cortona and has a subtle striped pattern. I bound this book using the Italian Long Stitch, which is the same binding style used for my more recent leather book. I love how two books with the same structure can have such a different aesthetic based purely on the cover materials.