Weaverly

Books and More Books

On campus a couple of days ago, behind the library, this sight left me speechless. Enjoy.

I am taking a weaving vacation and making books for a while. These coptic stitched volumes have covers printed on a gel plate. 

I left the spines undecorated and just let the linen stitching make its own statement. 

I tried trimming down the fore edges to make them more uniform. The pages are easier for the user to grab hold of that way, I think.

The trimmings make lovely little curls on my desk. I hate to throw these away. Any ideas for what I can do with them?

Department of Books:

I just finished reading Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend.

Puzzled

I've been raiding the puzzle cabinet across the street for some orphan jigsaw puzzle pieces that have lost their original boxes. What wonderful shapes! And sizes! I took a baggie of them home and glued them to cardboard, and have been using them as stamps in gel printing.

 

Here are some of the prints drying on my kitchen counter. They are printed on both sides and are the right size for binding into a small book. That will come later.

In the yarn department, some merino has been spun and plied, and will shortly get a warm bath.

 

A Printing Obsession

For some reason I seem to have caught the gel printing bug. It's been around for years now, and I'm a little late to the party. Never mind.

Perhaps it's the immediacy of the medium. You can be set up in minutes and start pulling prints right away. Very different from weaving, where you can spend days designing, then preparing the loom, winding bobbins, etc., before you throw the first pick. And then you've only just begun.

Or perhaps the wildflowers on my morning walk have stimulated the area of my brain that longs for lots of crazy color.

Well, whatever it is, I'm having fun. Eventually I'll use some of these papers in bookmaking.

And for a change-up, I'm still plugging away at the pink warp. Here's the morning sun throwing it in high relief.