Switching Gears

One of the things I had planned to make for the show a couple of weeks ago (has it really been that long already?) was handmade journals sewn as shown on Teesha Moore's site .  You'd have thought I used to be a Girl Scout, the way I was so well prepared for making these books!  It all started innocently enough, with having the paper torn down to make 10 each of 8x10 and 5x7, all stacked up neatly waiting for me to work on.  WAIT being the key word here-as in waiting til the last minute and then being up until 1:00 am the night before the show and making Gary pitch in to help out.  And then I only got the large ones done, but that's ok.  The plan was to simply paint the covers, but I got carried away & painted layer & layer, after adhering vintage paper to most of them, trying new techniques and having a ton of fun.  The good news is that I love the way they turned out, but I grossly underestimated the time to do them and when I figured out the money I had tied up in the materials for them, I almost fainted!  For some reason, the boards warped (canvas panels) which I finally got straightened out, but to this day can't figure out why that happened.  They'd been stored flat, and are meant for paint & such, so who knows, but it took a couple of days to flatten them out after they'd been painted-more lost time!   It was a good experience to make a bunch of them at once, though.  When I make 1 of something at a time, it's hard to figure out how much product    is actually used-how do you figure out how much gel medium or paint is used, for example, to male 1 book.  But in doing a batch of them, I was amazed at how much product was actually used up, which made it easier to come up with a price.  By midnight, I figured they should sell for about a million $$ each-lol!   It was a great sense of accomplishment for me, to start off with a batch of various materials and end up with 10 books-so cool!  And it felt good to switch gears and do something a little different for a change, a lesson that I need to remember, to always have something in the works that I can do instead of a canvas collage all the time.  On most of the book covers, I used techniques from the book Celebrate Your Creative Self by Mary Todd Beam.  It's a book that I've had on my shelf for years, and whenever I pull it off the shelf, I have to ask myself why it's not laying open on my worktable all the time.  It really is a good book, with some fun techniques that make you want to push the limits and just keep experimenting, which is exactly what I did with these books.  Even though I was pleased with all of them, the one that I liked the best was done using techniques from the above mentioned book, along with techniques that I learned in a class taught by Michelle Ward at Valley Ridge , using stencils made by my friend Tracie Lyn Huskamp.  Everytime I looked at it, I thought of my buddy Kim, whose favorite color is "blue, green, and anything in between"-that's the best way to describe the colors in this one.  OK, that's enough about books for now, but I have a lot of catching up to do, and wanted to make sure that I shared these with you all.  Now one of these days, I'm going to learn how to do that coptic stitch:)                                  

Comments

[jacqueline Wolven]

Just stunning! I am in the process of making my own books, but yours are just too beautiful for words.

[Tracie Huskamp]

OH WOW!!!! THAT IS INCREDIBLE... SUE... I am just teary eyed... you are SO SWEET.. the STENCILS LOOK GREAT!!!

I am off to Phoenix on Thursday... but will send everyone over to your post to show off your BEAUTIFUL WORK using my humble little stencils..when I get back

I am SO HONORED!!!! THANK YOU

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxooxoxoxoxoxo

[debby harriettha]

They are all beautiful!!! Great work.