28/04/2011

Making the 'Failure" book!

The essay for the book is finished and has been approved by my tutor. So I am now concentrating on getting the artist book made. Thank goodness I made the book cover a few weeks ago before the University closed for the Easter vacation! It reopened on Tuesday and I've now had a couple of traumatic days of small failures! It's strange how the things you expect to be difficult turn out to be easier than you anticipated and the things you haven't considered turn out to be the challenges and often the 'failures'! I have to say I was nervous at making such a large book - A3 - as the saying goes - size matters!!!

This is the first stage - the glueing and pressing and waiting ! There's lots of waiting while glue drys! I'm making 2 books - it's always good to have a back up copy in case things go wrong!
Then on to the stitching - this book is thick and needed hand drilled holes for the stitching - something I've not done before as my books never needed more than an awl to make the holes - the drill got stuck in the paper and was impossible to remove - but then I learnt a trick - to crease the drill bit with beeswax and it worked a treat!!
I'd hoped to finish the 2 books today but it was not to be - I was tired and not concentrating and placed the book back to front in the cover of my 'best ' one! So I had to take it apart and won't be able to finish it until Tuesday when the University reopens! Sigh - sometimes these bank holidays are not useful!


I'm becoming an expert at FAILURE...................

Hopefully the next post will be the END!!

Oh and yes I have included the tissue paper header in the book - thank you to all of you that encouraged me to do this.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow your header is amazing..

and what a great tip for the drill. I have had that happen - the drill bit gets buried and locked in a wad of paper and you think you've just wrecked the entire thing.
Now I know how to get around this.

I emailed Dinosoaur last week, with the image of your earring, so hopefully they will get back to me and I will have an "excuse" to shopping there....

the book is truly amazing..wow.

Anonymous said...

The book looks superb with its partial reverse lettering will it feature in your end of year show? Can't wait to see the finished piece.

lynda Howells said...

go for it girl..the end is in sightxxlynda