Last Saturday I took a class at the Museum of Printing History in which we bound a set of small books inspired by ancient Chinese books found at Dunhuang.
Whew, MAN! That was a fun 7 hours, I tell you. I have a few unfinished projects and a ton of supplies that my teacher gave me, but here are the books I finished:
Whirlwind binding: the brown pages are paper made by our instructor and include bits of sewing patterns, in which there are tiny bits of words and numbers. The “spine” is made from strips of vinyl covered in cotton quilting fabric that I once used to make a set of cloth napkins for my sister.
Butterfly binding: tea-dyed photocopies of antique court documents, joss paper “spine.” There’s a lot that I think is interesting about this super-simple binding technique, especially the possibilities of creating fake marginalia.
Stitched binding: this binding has folded leaves attached together, like the butterfly binding, but with the fold to the outside. Handmade paper again, and raffia poked through holes that run all the way through. I glued the ends of the raffia down, because I like how it makes them look like straps.
The inside:
Because of the folds, each of these “pages” could be turned into a pocket by gluing, or one can put totally inaccessible text inside.
Or!! Accessible text by using impermanent binding! Hey, that’s a good idea.
Pothi: isn’t this cute as hell? (in my language, “cyude as heyill”)
The pages are hand-torn, and the strap is twisted paper. The covers are pieces of vinyl (from venetian blinds) covered in paper.
So now I have lots of ideas. Now I just need to make myself sit down to play. My friend Sleuth S. asked me, “when are you going to start putting your own text inside your books?” which is an excellent question indeed.
Speaking of which, my poem “Laying Small Ghosts” was picked up for publication by Jabberwocky 5.
Two new recipes of note:
Stuffed pita pockets from Tea and Cookies. Tea writes a lovely blog full of beautiful pictures and yummy recipes. I don’t eat radishes that often, but I usually enjoy them. Instead of her cream cheese condiment, I used some artichoke-garlic dip left over from a Girl Gang party a couple of weeks ago, and it was a delicious little sandwich.
Egg muffins. What kind of genius idea is this? Frittata in muffin tins! I adjusted the recipe by using what I had in the fridge: feta, kalamata olives, chopped red bell pepper, sauteed leeks, and clippings from my shiny new herb pots. I haven’t had one yet, because their destiny lies as my breakfast this week, but they smell glorious.
I had sauteed leeks hanging around because I livened up Saturday morning’s cheese toast by layering them under some gruyere. My original idea had been mushrooms (a dinner last week), but alas! the mushrooms were beyond help. Still. WHY have I not regularly been putting veg under the cheese for my breakfast? Very yummy.
And finally, my Friday night and Saturday (all day) were eaten up reading Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis. It is terrific. I probably could’ve put it down, but I didn’t want to.