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Overthinking the journal

2011 journal pages, guidelines and golden rectangle
Starting my 2011 journal

Yesterday I started a new journal for the new year. For many people, that means popping down to Borders for a $10 ready-made journal with ruled lines, and interesting cover, and a useful magnetic closure. (I love those magnetic closures.)

Evidently that would be too easy for me.

Instead I built my own, basing the page proportion on the golden ratio (1:0.6180339887), and the page layout on Rosarivo’s “divine proportion” and the van de Graaf canon of page construction, in turn based on medieval manuscript page design.

I’m using a pad of short-grain sketch paper, and  I’ll bind it at the end of the year. Assuming I’m still writing in it by then. But of course I will be, right? It’s my new year’s resolution.

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I’ve moved!

… my blog, that is. After years on Blogger — checking the archives, I see that it’s been a little over 5 years — I’ve moved this calligraphy blog to my calligraphy website. It may be a few days before I get the sidebar back in order, but the posts are all here. The old site was here but it now redirects to this blog, and you should be able to see all the old posts here.

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A small Christmas commission

Just a little thing, but fun to do. It’s a private little song the client sings to her grandchildren, so I haven’t reproduced that here, but I can show the little pink and purple flowers I added in the left margin.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun working on a much bigger, very exciting commission that I expect will take a good while to complete. I’ll be sharing bits and pieces, although not the commission itself, in future posts.
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Envelopes

Using Adirondack alcohol inks and Martha’s blog posts as inspiration, I’ve just completed the last of the addresses in the annual envelope exchange … with a few extra envelopes for future purposes.

The 2nd photo shows the envelopes before they were addresses, and the stencil I used. Actually, I hated the addressing job I did on the bottom envelope, so I trashed it, made another round of stenciled envelopes and started again.
Fun!
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A Tale of Two Books

Just finished a commission for an accordion book. I thought I understood what the client wanted, but you know, every once in a while I just get it wrong.

I heard:

  • Stained glass but not religious (which I suggested would be difficult).
  • Masculine.
  • Traditional.
  • Muted colors.

Well, I’m not good with muted colors; this first attempt is muted colors … for me.

What I didn’t understand was the particular meaning of traditional. Looking at this first attempt I now realize that this looks like a particular style of my Presbyterian youth. My mother had jewelry that looks like this, and I was clueless about that connection while designing the book.

So I started over again with a style that the client had liked in the past. And I realize that even though it doesn’t have muted colors and it doesn’t seem very masculine to me, it is more traditional — in both a catholic and Catholic sense.
The cover is a green silk bookcloth shot through with gold. I think it works. I made a wrapper from handmade paper with leaf inclusions, using a strip of book cloth as the ribbon holding the bone clasp.
Commissions are always a learning experience.

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Bookbinding Tutorials

Today I went looking for a simple multi-signature book binding tutorial for a friend. En route I found all these interesting binding tutorials:

Makes me want to make a book.
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Origami + Calligraphy

Last month I did some table cards to identify the food at a reception featuring Japanese and Chinese cuisine. I meant to take some photos before I let them go, but, as often happens, I forgot. So I was cleaning up the studio today and came across the remains of the project. These rejects show the Japanese and Chinese cards, respectively.