Award and books and manic May

Welcome to my manic May; 4 printmaking days, book making, Living Crafts at Hatfield House, a stand at the House and Garden Asthma Fair at Chilford Hall, Linton near Cambridge, a weekend being Granny, tennis tournament, a couple of art exhibitions and.... most exciting of all.....my son Will coming back from Oz via Los Angeles and Vancouver for a few weeks!! Can't wait!!

Last week I had a lovely surprise, Miriam at 77 Belle awarded me the Liebster blog award for a blog she likes to read, started for blogs with less than 200 followers; another thankyou Miriam if you are reading this! I'll be looking out for blogs to pass on the award to.

I am on a course with Gina of Fan My Flame making books, here are a few of the results.

We started with simple and then more complicated folded books.

The next one is made with one piece of A3 paper.

Here's Gina showing us how to do it!

I used a map of Canada for the covers and saw a place KITCHENER, along with lots of other English place names, as it's my maiden name I made sure to use it, just folding and glueing the piece of map to slip over the book to keep it closed.

I like this structure that you can slip pages into the folds.

One without the pages in.

A few weeks ago I was lucky to receive this book from Lesley at Printed Material.

I thought I'd make a similiar one...

...it has a cover cut from one of my prints,

with map 'slots' holding pieces of different prints,

which could be written on the back.

The gift tags I sell could fit into the slots as well, or a larger version with pieces of plain paper would make an interesting note or sketch book. There are not enough hours in the day!!!!

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Artist's book course

I went on a great 2 day course last week with Gillian Hand  http://www.gillianhand.com/ at Art van Go in Knebworth. Gillian lives in Oz and has been over here for a few months sharing her book making skills.

Work in progress on a concertina book made with origami paper.

The finished book  (I will probably add some decoration to the covers), it was fun to make.

This flag book has a lovely sculptural look to it. On the 2nd day we tackled this one....

I used part of one of my prints as the cover with off cuts of somerset velvet paper as the pages.

 I love the spine of this book. It was tricky to make as my paper was really thick.

This one took most of the morning and I think we were all worn out!! However the final book was fun. We made the hard cover with a spine and stitched in 3 folios (a group of pages) using a linen thread with 2 needles to make the rope pattern down the spine.

Again I used a not so good lino print for the cover with some hand made paper pages. This was my first time at book making and took lots of concentration; so two tiring but enjoyable, successful days.