« January 2010 | Main | March 2010 »
Friday's book signing at Sutherland was a great success. I arrived at the gallery in Asheville's River Arts District early in the morning…
…and was greeted by energetic and talented owners Karen Donde and Barb Butler.
The gallery is a beautifully renovated warehouse space, high ceilinged and brightly illuminated, with the patina of old brick walls.
Their newly delivered Wolf Pup looms are in the process of being warped and are ready for classes.
More weavers arrived. Below from left to right are Betty Carlson and Catherine Ellis, and Bob Martin, showing off Betty's woven shawl.
And here are Kathy Roig (left) and Susan Leveille (right). Sorry I can't identify the others, but they are among a group of very enthusiastic participants in in the Sutherland classes.
Karen and Barb have some of their gorgeous weaving on display at the gallery. I was especially struck by this gossamer plain weave scarf in very fine silk by Barb (click to enlarge).
After chatting for a while about my experiences in self-publishing, selling copies of Network Drafting, The Woven Pixel, and The Liftplan Connection to these nice people, and signing books, I joined them for lunch at The 12 Bones Smokehouse, a restaurant experience not to be missed. 12 Bones is just across the street from the River Arts District, and it's worth waiting on line to get one of their salads or famous barbecue. Check out the rib flavors here:
The book with handwoven cover started here is now complete. I chose to wrap the first and last signatures in patterned paper, which would later be pasted down as endpapers. The remaining signatures have narrow wraps of the same paper plus a few in orange paper.
Here are the covers and the signatures, ready to punch.
After the sewing, the endpapers were glued down:
The other border of the wrapped signature had a nice deckle edge, which I decided to leave:
Here are two views of the spine…
…and a close-up of the stitching.The top row is kettle stitch, which transitions the sewing from one signature to the next at the head and tail of the book, and the second row is link stitch (sometimes referred to as coptic stitch).
Hitched an early ride to Furman Tuesday evening and spent an enjoyable two hours in the library reading the opening chapters of Perez-Reverte's The Nautical Chart. This is going to be a good one!
Sunset on this beautiful campus was especially memorable this evening.
The comfortable chairs in the reading area of the library are covered with this jacquard upholstery, and it was fun to try analyzing it:
Finally, the concert I was waiting for at Daniel Chapel: an organ recital with Charles Tompkins at the organ and Gary Malvern on trumpet. Then out for drinks with friends, and by the time I got home I was too tired to watch the ice skating. And so to bed.
From the stash comes this jacquard sampler of simple (one warp, one weft) weaves. Warp is hemp, weft cotton. I fused the cloth to lightweight paper.
After the paper-backed cloth was glued to boards, the low places between the turn-ins were filled in with rectangles of heavy paper. This side will all be hidden later by endpapers.
Here's what the public sides of the covers look like so far.
Knocked out another 400 picks on the double twill cloth yesterday. I had been planning to use this on a set of book covers, but now I am thinking WEARABLES. Changing paddles in midstream.
For an hour or so in the afternoon sun, I packed a basket of handwork. Yes, that's a Weavette. I'm wondering how a little Weavette square of handspun yarn would look inset in a book cover.
The response to my handmade books has been very gratifying. Thank you all for your comments; I treasure the feedback. Some of you have asked what I'll be doing with the books. Short answer: I don't know yet. I'm still on the learning curve. Many of the wrinkles remain to be ironed out (pun intended).
I do know that finding a new craft at the age of 70, after having spent so many years as a weaver, is a wonderful surprise and a gift. To be able to combine weaving and bookmaking is great! It looks like my initial goal of reducing the fabric stash will remain unmet, however. I now seem to be amassing a stash of paper!
Some bits and pieces of Thai paper were too good to throw away. When torn, they have lovely feathered edges. I glued them onto a background of another handmade paper.
Then I ran the sheet through the sewing machine several times.
I covered boards with the resulting decorated sheets. Folded signatures were wrapped in an interesting patterned brown paper. More of the brown paper decorates the front cover. The book was sewn with brown linen thread.
A second, smaller, book was covered in dark red Thai paper. A small scrap of handwoven fabric, backed with paper, is glued into a well in the cover.
The signatures were wrapped in a patterned green paper, striped on one side and randomly patterned on the reverse.
The book was sewn with light brown waxed linen.
The green wrappers on the first and last signatures were glued down to act as endpapers.
Here's a detail of the sewing and the fabric rectangle embedded in the front cover…
…and a glamor shot of the day's two books. The smaller book now sports a wooden button closure.
Finally: a view of my four most recent books. I love the spines. Can you tell?
Now a few observations after working for a while with cloth and papers in books.
The book now sports a button closure. Click to enlarge.
Friday, on the way to Charlotte, we passed the infamous Gaffney Peach on Interstate 85 and I snapped this picture (no, Mom, I wasn't driving). It's actually a water tower, but it does look like a giant you know what.
From the ridiculous to the sublime—when I got home I saw that the roofers had finally installed the new metal roof on Ampersand House. The metal is dark gray, but in the brilliant afternoon sun it reflects the blue sky. How wonderful! What I'm really looking forward to is sitting in the little house in the rain and listening to the drumbeats of rain on the roof.