A big, big book

For many years, the size of my artist books generally ran to about 3″ square. Manageable, I thought. The last few books have been closer to 5″ x 8″.

The project finished yesterday is 15″ x 19″. It felt something like trying to play the xylophone with my fingers, as though it were a piano. Over the winter break, I began helping the scrapbook committee of the high school Latin club to build a handmade scrapbook. We laminated two thickness of binder board together for both covers, and covered them with book cloth that we made with cotton, kozo paper and wheat paste. The front cover has 4 cutout windows, one with several waves cut into the bottom border. That was a covering adventure. My beloved Japanese screw punch was pressed (yuk yuk) into service for the post-and-screw binding. The punched spine pieces were turned in and a spine cover strip bound with the pages.

I wish I had thought to take a picture, but as soon as we finally got it finished I had to rush off to class.