well that's a crazy week

It all started with the Big Crafty last Sunday (I guess the craziness also includes the week before, when I was prepping stuff for it). Had a great time, and met some new (and old) friends, including these favorites: Sew Ono, Monkey & Squirrel, Beth Schaible, and Margaret Couch Cogswell.

Then I spent the rest of the week finishing a new commission binding, a bound book of letters written to the patriarch of a family for his 100th birthday. It includes silver birch bark (on the cover) and leaf prints (on the endsheets) from an area in western NC where the family often gathers at a summer cottage, plus custom calligraphy by Cheryl Jacobsen. The cover is handmade paper by me, dyed a rich dark brown with natural walnut dye.

Along with this book, I was also prepping like crazy for my week-long residency at Studio 150 in Gordo Alabama, where Jessica Peterson and Amos Kennedy live and work. I'm here now, and gonna go set up a press as soon as I finish this post! I'll post more during this week.

Slay a bookbinder

I recently found this on another bookbinder's website:

Writing in 1898 Kenneth Grahame noted that:

“As a general rule, the man in the habit of murdering bookbinders, though he performs a distinct service to society, only wastes his own time and takes no personal advantage”

In 1904 he expanded on that thought, perhaps because some book had still not been completed/delivered:

“Not in that he bindeth books - for the fair binding is the final crown and flower of painful achievement - but because he bindeth not: because the weary weeks lapse by and turn to months, and the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not: and the heart grows sick with hope deferred.

Each morn the maiden binds her hair, each spring the honeysuckle binds the cottage porch, each autumn the harvester binds his sheaves, each winter the iron frost binds lake and stream, and still the binder bindeth not.

Then a secret voice whispereth: ‘Arise, be a man, and slay him! Take him grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes broadblown as flush as May; at gaming, swearing, or about some act that hath no resish of salvation in it!’

But when the deed is done, and the floor strewn with fragments of binder - still the books remain unbound…”

Hah! It really cracks me up. On that note, I just finished binding a book. It's a sampler of 4 different link stitches and 2 different kettle stitches, bound on wooden boards. I used instructions from J.A. Szirmai's The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding.