Adventures in Bookmaking

First off, a question of metaphor. Why is it that the things you love doing can literally make you sick? Opening old books and breathing in their history at the October Friends of the Library book sale. Collecting fallen leaves. Walking sodden mushroom trails. Admiring the concentric circles of a newly mown hay bale. Savoring a bowl of hot oatmeal (with cow's milk) on a crisp morning. I love these fall activities, but they inspire an inflammatory response in my body. Somehow I have to figure out a way to help my body go along with what my heart needs.

OK, pity party is now over.

This fall I have been making books. A year or so ago I bought a beautiful bookmaking kit from painter/printmaker/book maker/all-around swell gal Erin Zamrzla (aka Etsy seller Erinzam). (Check out this gallery of her work at Poppytalk Handmade.)

My work schedule was crazy last year, so the kit got put away and was lost for a while. In a partial clean-up of my office this summer, I finally found the kit again, and put it together with the awls I bought from Books By Hand.

Erinzam's kit teaches simple Japanese stab-binding techniques, and it's a very gentle introduction to the meditative art of constructing a book. (I love the equation of paper + sewing = construction.) The kit included papers that Erin had cut from an old DIY manual, which opened my eyes to the myriad sources of found paper around me. I would show you the small book I made from the kit, but my son immediately took off with it and loved it up and added his own designs. It's now being re-flattened under a tall stack of heavy textbooks.

For the simple book above, I used indigo Japanese chiyogami for the front and back covers (note how beautifully the chrysanthemum-like flowers coordinate with Resurrection Fern's crocheted covered stone!) and unwaxed, unbleached linen thread, also from Books By Hand, for the binding. The inside pages are stationery from a 1987 Venice Simplon Orient Express trip, a find at the Friends of the Library book sale. I have some ideas for what I want to fill it with, and they make me silly-happy just thinking about them.

I can't conclude my adventures in novice bookmaking without a few more links in this already linky post to my inspirations: poet/walking buddy/maker extrordinaire Quince and Quire, who is on hiatus from her own bookmaking adventures, and paper cutter/photographer/maker extrordinaire Smoothpebble, who is a book maker and inspirer. Like Erin, they are all-around swell gals. Not to be too hokey, but the love of books binds us--as well as so many of my blogging friends--together.