Black-n-Red Book

Susan speaks:

This book was made in a class taught by Albie Smith. In the morning we made paste papers, in the afternoon we put the book together.  I like making paste papers and I like even better combining the technique with sgrafitto (scratch marks) and some printing. I also used both white, black and cream papers as a base. As usual, my stuff had lots of black and dark colors, which makes me happy.  The two pictures below show the front and back end pieces with the first and last page of the first and last signature. Got that?

The book has 4 signatures of 5 folded papers, the first/last page of each signature is slightly larger and is also paste paper. I made a few random blops on some of the other signature pages.

 I definitely liked Albie's design of having each signature "read" as a separate entity with the added benefit of more pages to display your art on. Pictures below show first/last pages of the other signatures.

One thing I've learned over the years is that you should not choose to deviate from the instructor's handout during the classtime. If you do, you wind up having the instructor think you don't understand it and then you waste time trying to explain what you are doing and that you do know what you are doing and that you'd rather do it your way, even though you paid to learn it their way.  And you confuse the hell out of the people at your worktable who might be looking at your work.

In this class I deviated from the handout when I did the spine stitching. Even though I am not big on matchy-matchy stuff I do like the stitching to be balanced on the inside of the signatures. I figured out a way to make this happen so I finished up the stitching of the book back in my room.  That's why my book isn't in the pictures of the class books. One of my partners in crime, Diane, made a really beautiful book -- in the class picture it's the one with the pale blue spine and diamond pattern.  Diane spent 20 years in the Air Force as a navigator so she and Don have a special bond.