Unexpected Results.

You saw Merlin making himself at home on top of this book, yesterday...it has progressed a bit since then, perhaps not as much as I would like, but nonetheless.

I realised while stitching, that this is another Purple Rain book.  There's enough of that pink paper to make a series.  This is hand made paper, and it felt stiff enough to allow it to stand up as an accordion, but not so stiff as to make it unpleasant to hand stitch.  So far, so good; all true.  What I didn't appreciate, though, was the effect of the stitch itself on the nature of the paper, or, more accurately, I suspect, the amount of handling the paper is getting in order to put that stitch in place.  The paper is going all floppy (to use that well known technical term).  When you put this amount of stitch into a quilt, it stiffens it; into a single layer of fabric, and it distorts it.  This is both distorting the paper and softening it.  It's actually reminiscent of working with Evolon, which also softens if you handle it a lot. 

I got a bit perturbed.  Here's the book, standing on its edge, to let you see how it is progressing.

I've positioned it very carefully, otherwise it looked rather like a drunk propped up against a low wall.  And I fretted about it, just a bit.  But then I remembered that this is a book; books don't routinely get propped up like this for display.   They're usually seen flat, opened and read, one page at a time.  So I stopped fretting and decided I liked the book as a book, rather than as a sculpture.  It'll be fine.

You can't see it in the image, but there's still a bit of a cat shaped indentation in that front page... I suspect it will be meeting an iron, or possibly a lot of heavy hard backed books, once I've finished the stitch.  The thread, incidentally, is hand dyed variegated silk thread with an uneven texture.  The purple strips are Khadi paper, which I'd bought to make a book with...didn't quite have this in mind, but it works.

Changing Direction?

So... ever since I wrote this post, I've had making books in the back of my mind.  Just as I said I would in the post, I had folded up some Lutradur XL and popped it underneath some of my boxes to crease properly.  I checked them a few days ago, and they need to stay there a bittie longer, so I thought that was that.  Until I emptied the four boxes that came in from the garage...remember them?  In one of them was four accordion books, made from Khadi paper, which I had dyed using tannin, herbal teas, onion skins and birch bark, to varying effect.  I thought, I can play with these...but it has become much more than that.

I've made three books in two days.  That's almost unheard of in my current state....but the scale they are, made that possible (hurrah)... I have  a real sense of achievement, as it usually takes a long time to finish something, given the rate at which I work now.  And that has made me think... maybe this is the way I need to work now.  I've been thinking about it for months, if not years, but have avoided it.  Not sure why.  A lack of focus, perhaps.  Fear of doing something new (even although it's not new, really, I've been making artists books for years).  Not wanting to admit defeat (albeit in a very positive way).  Turns out, what I needed was to Just Do It.  Duh.  I knew that, right?

So...here's the first one.  It's linked to the Borderlines piece, and refers in places to the structural elements of that piece.  It uses a restricted palette, and a limited number of fabrics, only four, with only three being used on each page.  I've worked in a similar way to that before, in the 'Meditation In Purple And Gold' series that you can find on the blog if you search.  Here's what it looks like...

I wanted to refer to landscape in this, just as Borderlines does.  The first and last pages are direct references to Borderlines; the rest are developed from thoughts of landscape. 

These three pages all use the same fabrics, a paper that had been hand dyed and crushed up repeatedly, a piece of lutradur and a scrap of silk voile.  The first two are the direct references to Borderlines, though the stitch in all of the pieces directly refers back to that, too.

The remaining pages use the same lutradur and paper, plus a piece of transfer dyed Evolon.

I had to fight myself, somewhat.  Textile people always think in terms of 'fronts' and 'backs', and stitchers are taught to try to make the back look like the front.  I had to remind myself that books don't have 'fronts' and 'backs'; they have pages.  When I tried to do a double back stitch, I poked a hole in the paper (don't ask).  So...reader, I Used Knots.  It felt really quite rebellious.  And there are a few knots in the front, too, just to be consistent.  So... here's the back...I mean...the other pages...

There's more diversity here; it still refers to nature, though most of the pieces on this side refer to stones, rather than the overall landscape, with the exception of the central piece, which harks back to landscape again.  I wanted to use fragments of fabric with meaning, but that would complement the stitch, which, of course, had come through from (cough) the other side.  In some ways, I'm happier with this side, than I am with the other, though to me, the other side is the main carrier of meaning. 

So...what did I learn? 
1. Whatever it is you do with stitch on one side, you're going to have to deal with on the other.
2. Scale is even more important here, than it is on a 2D piece of work.  I'm happy with all the pages, but the first five are Too Big.  Each one stands beautifully on its own as a piece of work, but not as a unified whole.  There's not enough space in there to allow you to contemplate each page as an individual entity and also as a unified whole.  If it was a normal bound book, it might not be so important, but an accordion, by its very form, needs to be a unified whole for it to work well as a piece of art.
3. Unless you're prepared to disrupt whatever it is you did on the first side, you're going to have to glue the elements to the second side, or not add anything.  I did contemplate printing on the second side, but decided I didn't want to risk marks coming through to the other side.  I need to experiment with that, to see if it's possible.  I think it probably is, if I use printing inks, but you never know.
4. Stitching on khadi accordion paper is a pain.  It's never sitting quite like you need it to be, and it's thick, and unforgiving.  Mind you, the same will be true of anything I use as a substrate, so I figure I just need to suck it up like a good little princess.

That learning transferred over to the second piece.  More tomorrow.