Passing Time Outside of the Studio

The painters arrive tomor­row to fin­ish the great house paint­ing project. They will be paint­ing my office, the DH’s office, and my stu­dio. I am work­ing out of a lit­tle rolling cart on the kitchen counter. Severe­ly lim­it­ed in terms of mate­ri­als and tools.

The House of Myth­i­cal Crea­tures is on hold for the week. It’s ready for each of the images to be mount­ed. I have to fig­ure out how I’m going to attach the images one to anoth­er. I’m think­ing about some sort of book­bind­ing. Hence my project for the next week is to exper­i­ment with some ways of bind­ing books.

Today I made (my first) two books.

A strange lit­tle fold­ed book whose pages open up fur­ther than you think they ought to. I think it’s bor­ing. But the tech­nique of sim­ply attach­ing the pages to a con­tin­u­ous back­ing has mer­it. It would have to be more than just a line of black mat boards taped togeth­er, that’s bor­ing too.

The sec­ond book looks like a checker­board with over­lap­ping pages with cutouts. I can’t real­ly see how it fits with THMC. This one has pos­si­bil­i­ties for some oth­er projects rat­tling around in the back of my head though. Espe­cial­ly once I get over the idea that the cut­aways have to be square. I’ll make some more of these in the next cou­ple of days.

I have dis­cov­ered that I still get annoyed when cut lines and parts don’t line up exact­ly. I’ve always been par­tic­u­lar about those sorts of things. Luck­i­ly I have learned a num­ber of tricks over the years. Sto­ry sticks and cut­ting mul­ti­ples in one go are the first two I used.

The instruc­tions for the checker­board book called for cut­ting out six tem­plates (from a xerox) and then trac­ing the tem­plates onto the page paper and then cut­ting those out. A recipe for dis­as­ter. Much bet­ter to fig­ure out the dimen­sions of the full page (3−3÷4″ high x 5″ wide plus a ⁷⁄₈″ gut­ter) and cut a bunch of page blanks. Then I could fig­ure out the dimen­sions of the cut­aways (1−1÷4″ square) and take them out of the full size pages. Except the lit­tle tiny one at the front. I just cut that one on it’s own.

PS Yes, I real­ize that there are no decent pic­tures of recent work on THMC. I’ll fix that soon.

edit­ed 25.june.2008 to cor­rect image links