(Note: This is a long chat and if you don't see a video at the end of the post, click on the post title. The post will open in your browser and you should get the video. I promise to be a little less long-winded next time!)
A few years ago I spotted something called "envelope inserts" on a business supply clearance table. The heavy card, used to prevent mailed documents from bending, was too good a deal to pass up at $2.10 for 25 letter-sized sheets. And it was 100% recycled and made in Canada to boot. I bought two packs with no idea what I'd do with them. But the other day I dug them out, thinking the stiff, rough-textured paper might make good covers for a book.
At the same time I was playing around with mark-making, using acrylic ink and cheap paper (from a roll of heavy-ish newsprint made for Ikea's kid art easel). I used twigs, a bamboo skewer and a few hand-made brushes cobbled from chopsticks and clusters of bristles that had fallen out of the boot scraper by the studio door.I also had a set of leaf stamps I'd made years ago from a sheet of floor-laying cushion I'd found abandoned in a parking lot. (I admit I'm a magpie, packing home anything that looks promising for printmaking!)
Sink stoppers, being rubber, make great stamps too.
These are the four sheets I ended up with.
Nothing much, really. Although the striped one has possibilities.
When I looked closely, I liked how the ink had bled through to the other side of the thin paper.
It happened with the leaf stamps, too, and I quite liked that look. Putting aside the striped sheet and the leaf sheet until I could decide how to take advantage of the bleed-through, I was left with the two sad, muddled sheets.
I hoped cutting them up might somehow make them more interesting. The lightweight pages weren't suitable for my usual pamphlet stitch binding -- any writing on the page was going to show through to the other side.
There is a Japanese technique of folding the page in half and then, rather than binding the folded side of the paper, you bind the open side. In effect, it doubles the paper into a single page.
I interspersed sheets of purchased handmade paper between the folded pages and got ready to bind them together using the Japanese Stab Binding. Long, narrow pages work best because the binding itself takes up about an inch of the page.
Although it's a simple binding, I need to follow directions in a how-to book (I'm using the 1997 Handmade Books by Kathy Blake) to get the stitching sequence. I won't try and explain how to do it here -- there are excellent tutorials on line and in books.
I've tied off on the back of the book -- I like the look of the knot showing -- but the binding can also be done in a way that puts the knot out of sight inside the book.
I designed the size of the book so I could get two covers from one sheet of the cardboard and the most pages from the inked paper and ended up with enough pages for two books. I like how, in the bottom book, the handmade paper hides the patterned paper offering a bit of a surprise when you turn the page. That's something I'll keep in mind for future books.
As I flip through the books, the pages seem to invite a story. "Once there was a little fox..." If this leads anywhere, I'll let you know.
