A Textured Journal

Susan again (with some help from Don):

Wednesday night was Jacqueline Sullivan's Stenciled, Textured Journal. Jacqueline always has a good class kit and excellent instruction sheets and booklets prepared for her classes. Her supplies included a generous amount and choice of Golden paints. I've had several classes with her and she always has some new twist or way of doing things. If you can't make a class with her you might check her website for her instructional DVD.

In this class we had her husband, Victor, working as her assistant so there was plenty of help available if you needed it. I was punching holes in the papers prior to stitching and found that my awl had a burr at the end. This was making the job much harder to do than it needed to be. I asked for a file or rasp to get the burr off and Victor said, "Just run outside and rub it across the sidewalk to sharpen it." Worked like a charm!

Some artists don't like making books that just have plain paper pages in them, they prefer to have painted papers or content in their books. I pretty much agree but I've found that showing a handmade book with blank pages to an amateur (i.e., non-artist) is less confusing to them. They find it easier to "get" and when you transition to showing them somewhat abstract content in the other books you've made they don't have that deer-in-the-headlights look. You know, the look just before they say, "Oh, how.................. nice."

So both plain paper and content-loaded books have a place on my bookshelf.

The close-up pictures below show more of the dimension and depth of the texure of the cover. Most people picked brown or natural tones to go with their stencils so of course I had to be contrary and aimed for a techno-grunge look.