Good morning readers.

I’ve actually been home for a few days but have been busy catching up on schoolwork and household chores.

I hope everyone that celebrated had a great Thanksgiving.  I don’t know about you, but I avoided “Black Friday” like the plague. Instead we went to a new brewery and tasted different beers and ate pizza and spent a lovely afternoon together as a family.  It’s something we don’t often get to do as my sisters and parents live upstate so I don’t get to see them as often as I should.

I recently participated in the second book swap held over on the Book Arts Forum. Here are a few photos of the book that I made.

One of the things that I like about the swap is that It gives me a chance to play with techniques and materials without worrying about them being perfect. The book I made for this swap is similar to the last in size but I played around with different cover materials.

Here are the specs….The book is 7.5″ tall x 8″wide, it has 40 leaves of hand torn Stonehenge paper, Canson MiTientes endsheets. The back cover and spine is silk and acrylic paint. The front cover is and onlay of a matboard sandwich with colored paper and a handcut design. It has hand sewn headbands and ribbon bookmarks with glass beads.

Of note…

Registration has started for the Art & Soul Retreat in Hampton, Virginia this coming May 2008. There are a few interesting book making workshops. I am thinking about taking one given by Daniel Essig.

There is a nice paste paper tutorial posted by Cassie over on the Paper Kitty blog. Paste paper is fun and easy and makes great looking book covers. You can get as creative with it as you like.

Lots of folks have been looking for one of these… a tutorial on the Secret Belgian Binding. You can see a great example of one of these bindings by Rhonda over on the My Handbound Books blog.

There is an interesting tutorial for making an envelope accordian book over on the Paper Source site. This could def. be made into a hardcover book by adding covers just like in my basic accordian tutorial.