Couldn't Leave Well Enough Alone...

I couldn't keep my hands off the sharks. The bottom just didn't look quite right. So in a fit of industrious exuberance I added more. The next morning, I wished I hadn't. It's not awful. I just preferred the other version.

Alas.

Be Careful What You Take to Bed With You

Nearing completion.

How ironic that I started this book/object before the situation I mentioned in my last post. Next time I get the urge to portray sharks circling something, I will take note.

Before I go further, I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, my legitimate readers and friends for their support and encouragement. I've been deeply moved by the kind comments, messages and emails that I've received since I last posted. It's been a bright spot during an otherwise dark time, and has meant a lot to me.

Not to turn this into a medical novel, but I also have an endocrine disorder that makes stress potentially dangerous. What's been going on made me pretty ill, and at one point nearly landed me in the ER. I hesitate to mention this, after bringing up my M.S. diagnosis earlier made me a target for psychosis and cruelty. But the kind people in my life have been fantastic. In addition to great filtering, a trustworthy friend has taken over monitoring and moderating my comments for me. On the off chance something inappropriate gets through, I won't see it. Thank you.

Lovely washi.

On a happier note, I have a book project to share. I've finally been able to get back in the studio a bit, and have been on a Japanese paper binge. If you dip pieces of it into paste (in this case, rice starch paste) and remove the excess, you can form the  paper into almost anything. Leave it on waxed paper to dry, and you can have, for instance, miniature billowing drapes.

And what's especially lovely is that it is non-toxic. I wouldn't want to dip my bare hands in acrylic medium or PVA, but rice starch and distilled water? I feel like a kindergartner with something really cool and slimy.

Sticky slime! Dip into the paste, then run the paper
through fingers to remove the excess. Then shape.

After drying.

Curtains!

Arranging. 

Be Careful What You Take to Bed With You.

Bed Book Project

I've had an idea for a sculptural book running through my head. "Be careful what you take to bed with you" will be the only text it will contain.

I've also been looking at books about miniatures and dolls' houses. So I built a miniature bed. Or rather, half a bed. It's going to sit on the open book, looking as if it were sticking out of it. Or at least that's the idea.

Here's the bed frame, which is made from book board, paste and Washi:

Here's the bed after a mattress, pillow and blanket molded from Washi, foam, quilt batting, thread and paste was added. It has a stiff, papier maché-like texture:

The book block has been sewn and is waiting to be cased in. The plan is to make a little paper sculpture monster or swimming sharks or something to put under the bed. I might also add walls or flooring from folded pieces of paper. I am allowing it to develop and let it suggest things to me.

Floating Pictures in Slide Holder

I've been playing around with a translucent microscope slide holder. I glued some pictures of white doves onto slides and stacked them inside. The effect reminds me a bit of a miniature fish tank, with things floating in a little box. Only the semi-opaque character of the plastic adds a certain ghostly mystery.

Retail Therapy

I've been away. I had to travel to a big University of California medical campus for what turned out to be some ok help from one department, and some patronizing and dispiriting non-help from another.

Alas, feeling down and wanting to console myself, I did a little shopping. Large universities, especially ones with big science programs, have bookstores with esoteric goodies. Coming all this way, at least I could pick up a few petri dishes, slide holder cases and watch glasses for later. I have some slides at home and was wondering what I could sandwich between them in the semi-translucent holders.

I think some of the petri dishes will become "cards" for friends. I'm trying to figure out what to use to write inside them that will suggest fuzzy and/or semi-translucent blobs of cultured bacterial matter. Suggestions are welcome.

The student checking me out at the bookstore asked if I was doing an experiment. "No, I'm an insane artist and I'm going to use these to make bacterial-looking birthday cards." His face brightened considerably.

Making Book Cloth

Book cloth making time! I first did a few sheets following the directions I learned a long time ago from a book, using rice starch paste. Then I experimented a bit.

[Please be patient and try not to get confused, since I took pictures at various times when I was doing different cloths. We might jump around from florals to squirrels without notice.]

First, you need a smooth flat surface to work on. I've saved my old worn-out cutting mats and use the back sides of those. Spritz the cloth with water--get it good and damp. Smooth it out with the right side of the fabric facing down:

On a piece of scrap paper (here, newsprint), brush an even layer of paste onto the backing paper, which should be just a bit larger than your piece of cloth. Always brush from the center out to the edges and be sure not to miss any spots. I'm using basic Japanese kozo:

Smooth backing paper, paste side down, over the fabric:

Using a dry brush helps smooth the paper:

As does using a rolled up towel to tamp down the paper onto the fabric. This also, especially, helps create a better bond between fabric and paper:

I also use another method to smooth down the paper onto the fabric, but almost hesitate mentioning it. This could potentially stretch your fabric and push too much glue onto the side of the fabric you don't want it on. That said, I've discovered that carefully using a roller (going, as you always should, from center outward towards the edges) will give you incredibly smooth and well-bonded book cloth (you might not even want it that smooth--this could partly be a matter of what you desire):

The original method I was taught was that one should now carefully turn and smooth the book cloth over onto a new, clean surface, right-side up, then paste around the edges to hold it down flat as it dries:

From recent experience, I can report that this is also an excellent way to drop your wet, newly-made cloth and ruin it. (I did not take a pic for posterity.)

So what I started to do was just leave the cloths in place--don't 

touch!--right-side down to dry, without an extra turning step. (Do you know why we are supposed to turn over the cloth? Does not turning increase the likelihood of paste getting onto the side of the fabric you don't want it on?) Regardless, I've found that, at least for the dropping-prone, the leave it alone method works:

When dry, peel it off, trim off the extra paper edging and voilà--book cloth:

Daily Planners

My Daily Planner

I did a stupid thing last month. I discovered that if one takes life-sustaining meds, it's a bad thing to forget a dose. A really bad thing. This little oversight, and then my trip south, put me out of commission worse than usual for a while. I guess I should've paid more attention to my own bookmark design from a few years ago. Alas.

I'd been planning to contribute something for an exhibition next month at Eureka Books that our local book arts guild is having. I was going to make something appropriately sellable and commercially pleasing, like my miniature cat ABC book. But it just wasn't in me. So I finished My Daily Planner instead. It fit my mood better.

PS: I wrote earlier about how I waxed the papers to make the cover material for the little books.

E-motives Laptop, Finished

The cover has a little more wobble than I'd like, and there turned out to be problems with the Tyvek cover—it was wearing on the corners. So I did some touch-up and coated it in matte medium, which seems to have worked. It's not the texture I would've preferred, but still, my little book about online depravity is done. 

(An earlier post about some of the inside pages is here.)

E-motives Laptop Project

The miniature laptop, my recreational amusement of the moment, is coming along. The basic form is assembled. The keyboard will be resized and added soon. For a while it wouldn't close properly, but that problem was solved with the use of a smaller diameter hinging wire. And the pages for the book, which will be housed in the "screen" and are meant to look like parody web pages, are just waiting to be put together (the mock ups are shown here). 

"How to stalk someone" turns out to actually be a popular search item on Google. I was thinking in terms of parody, outrageousness (although you'd think I'd know better, seeing as I've been harassed myself). After typing only a little bit of it, the rest of the phrase quickly pops up, suggested by the search engine itself. This is presumably based upon this term's 5,190,000 hits. Um.....interesting. I think.

Etc...

(Ok--perhaps it'll make more sense once it's finished...?)

Tyvek For a Miniature Laptop

I've had an idea that I've been hoping to turn into into a book before the We Love Your Books submission deadline in less than a month. The theme for their next show is "e-motive," to be interpreted widely. The book will be about unsavory things people do online--"not everybody's e-motives are as nice as yours and mine" will be part of the text.

I decided on a sculptural cover designed to look like a laptop. It's made of bookboard and a little bit of basswood. For the keyboard and overall look of it, I scanned all the various sides of an actual old grey laptop and manipulated them in Photoshop. Even so, what could I use for a covering material that would suggest a laptop in looks and texture?

I had a hunch that Tyvek might just work. In Photoshop, I made a sheet-sized area to print from the scan of the laptop's outer top cover. It's a slightly textured-looking grey. I printed this onto the Tyvek with my pigment inkjet. Only it came out green, not grey. So I tried it again only using black ink. Not bad.

To hinge it together, I cut a plastic cotton swab handle into sections and fashioned them into a hinge attached to alternating parts of the cover's inner edges. Through this I will thread a wire to hold it together. It's still not assembled, but it looks as though it's going to work. The reason the bottom half looks blue and streaky in the photo is that I had to rip the Tyvek off. It's waiting to be re-covered. The keyboard will be added on top of that.

It doesn't exactly feel like a plastic laptop cover, but it suggests a plastic-like texture, and is definitely not like paper. And the variations in the Tyvek add to a look of beat-up old laptop. We'll see...

The book's pages are going to fit into the screen area on top. Along with all the rest of it, I'm still working on those.

Background on Tyvek

My Daily Planner

Book blocks made from pharma inserts, waiting to be cased in.

Here's some more background on those miniature books I mentioned in the last post. Several months back, I found a 7-compartment weekly pill organizer in the drugstore. There was just something about the size of it—slightly larger than usual—that screamed "art supply."

I decided to make little books that look like day planners, one for each compartment. The pages come from copies of the pharmaceutical inserts from my meds. They are 7/8" x 1-5/8".

I've been trying to find a suitable covering material for the little books. I'd been thinking of using Tyvek, but in the end it didn't look "day planner" enough. Mostly, the tiny lettering just didn't look right no matter how I tried to affix it to the Tyvek. I opted, instead, for inkjet prints on paper.  

I made a solid black background and used white lettering. But then the coated inkjet paper scratches so easily and the texture wasn't quite right--what to do?  I decided, as a protective gesture, to coat the papers with beeswax, something new for me. It turned out that the coating not only offers scratch resistance, but the texture of the wax rubbed into the paper definitely suggests "day planner" to me. I was quite pleased with the result. They are smooth and glossy and not "waxy" at all (unfortunately, the picture doesn't convey this very well).

I made the first one last night and eagerly showed my husband, who said, "Wow, a bible--how funny!" 

Bible?! 

I had to confess, it did look more "bible" than "day planner." 

At any rate, I can recommend wax-coating inkjet printouts. I'll explain a little bit more about my process for coating them in the next post.

A finished "day planner"

Tyvek Tinting

Tyvek is so versatile. I've been trying to find the right cover material for a set of miniature books (more on them later). I decided Tyvek might be the way to go. Even though I have some big sheets of it, I decided to split apart some Tyvek mailing envelopes--the lazier and cheaper method when working on miniatures.

My favorite way of decorating Tyvek is to use a foam cosmetic sponge dipped in acrylic ink. I then evenly smooth the color over the Tyvek, rubbing it in with the foam sponge.

It's best to work on top of some scrap paper and to wear vinyl or rubber gloves (I like the close-fitting kind, not the dishwashing kind).

Rubbing an even layer of the ink into the Tyvek brings out the patterns of its non-woven fibers. And one of the nicest things about acrylic ink is that it doesn't leave any discernible texture or tackiness--perfect for book pages. It just soaks into the Tyvek.

Once the Tyvek is decorated, it can be used for all sorts of things. Cut into strips, it can be used as decorative tapes to sew signatures onto. Keith Smith, in Non-adhesive Binding Books Without Paste or Glue, says of it: "Archival, flexible and strong, Tyvek seems perfect for pages in a book. It can be sewn...and since it is strong, it can be a substitute for book cloth. PVA must be used for the adhesive..."

I've used it for accordion pages and small book covers. Most of what I've read claims it's archival, although I think nobody will know for certain until it has been used for more decades. Keith Smith cautions that some binders are skeptical, warning that the plasticizer in it may eventually dry out and shatter. That said, the stuff is used to wrap houses and it's a popular art material. I just use it and enjoy.

This shows a little gift book I made a while ago. The cover material and the pages are paste-painted Tyvek. I wish the photo could convey its tactile quality--very sturdy, yet people seem to like to pet the  covers and pages.

Adverse Events on Codex...with Some Poisonous Plant Exposure

I have a collection of pharmaceutical informational inserts. I mostly use them as art material. Some actually came with my own prescriptions, and some were given to me. (It's helpful to have an acquaintance in the medical field who is willing to pass these things along.)

I first started paying attention to them when I was putting together an entry for a We Love Your Books show in '07.  The theme was A (is for add) B (is for book) C (is for collaborate). I chose to do P is for Pills. It was probably the first book-related thing I did that I packaged in a pill bottle. I filled it with little pamphlet-style books made from the informational inserts.

At any rate, I felt that my bottles of "Codex" (tiny books in capsules that, as a work, I'm calling The Literary Cure), needed a little something more--an accompanying informational insert, of course! So I opened up InDesign and Illustrator and got to work.

Of this edition of five, three are already spoken for, and one will be headed to a big book fair at the end of this week. I have not actually made that many bottles of Codex yet. Tiny capsules with tiny books are slow going for someone with hand issues (that is, me). The three that are being purchased were ordered by someone who is willing to wait, even knowing that it might take me months. What a great person! I partly added the insert for her. She deserves a little something extra for her patience.

All this reminds me of the funniest real pharma insert I've seen. Have you ever read the fine print on some of these? This was for a well-known sleeping aid. It had the familiar charts displaying the adverse events that had been noted in clinical trial subjects. After all the various bodily systems and their related side effects were listed, there was a mysterious category of "social circumstances." Here it was noted that one research subject, after consuming the sleeping aid, had experienced "exposure to poisonous plant." I tried to imagine... a crazed sleepwalker nibbling on a euphorbia? Running through a field of poison oak? The possibilities...