Curse Is Broken!

I have finally finished one of the Carol Berg books.  Here are photos of the tome I bound for my dear friend Stacy.  This is book one - Flesh and Spirit.  The covers are poplar with only a varnish, the beads are a Hungarian glass with red, green, and gold leaf.  The end papers are a hand made cotton with flecks of flower in them.  I really wanted a kind of natural feel for her copies.  I'm hoping now that I have one of them done the other 4 will not give me fits.

I also designed a tape lace bunny for Easter, but ran out of pins to keep working on it.  The pins got dumped down the air vent a week ago.  *sigh* Ah, well.

Keeping Busy

I have been working on a number of lace and book projects. I've got an Idrija lace mouse that's coming along well and a lot of tatting that I've yet to document and get up, but I've had a topsy-turvy week and hope that things will get back to "normal" soon.  Below are things I've been able to photograph and I hope they inspire you to get creative this spring.

 This is one of the Lighthouse books that I'm hand binding.  This is a French stitch over linen tapes.

 

Here is the same book after being rounded and covered in crush.

 

Here is attempt 2 at making the silk book cloth I want to cover the books with. The first one I have embroidered first and then ruined.  I'm hoping that making it paper backed first then doing the embroidery will work out.

 

On the lace front here is the finished couched threads for making my first Reticella needle lace piece.  I've filled in many of the motifs now, but haven't photographed it yet.  Reticella is the oldest form of true lace.

The Berg Project

Here are the unfolded "hot off the press" sheets. I learned the hard way that the paper was too high a poundage; so these books are going to be "tomes" as my husband said.


These are the rough folded signatures. There are 5 pages per signature and the ruler is 2 inches ... that's a lot of book. I hadn't pressed the book yet so I was hopeful.


This is just one section being pressed. I divided it all up into four parts then emptied my shelves of heavy books to press everything. There were three Shakespeare anthologies, a Milton anthology, several art history textbooks, an encyclopedia, and a couple of boxes of old hardbacks. I then left it all for two days.


The books are smaller after pressing, but they are still too "oversized" to do my original binding design. I spent a couple of days working out other designs before settling on doing a case-in (glad I got 2 yards of the silk). I really wanted an exposed spine, but I don't think it would be stable enough as the books are about 3 inches thick.


I'll take more pics and post them this week. The marbled papers arrived and I've been hand tarring the sheets to size.