dmnh's creative endeavors: books, clay and atcs

Hello People!

I'm clipping right along with the herd on the 365 Project. I am so thankful it includes all kinds of art this year!!!

I'm now done playing with paper and string for a bit. I need to find some more string to finish sewing together the laptop bag. I'm thinking some candlewicking thread I have will do the job, just need to drag it all out from the corner in the cutting room and get busy on it. Perhaps there will be a finished laptop bag the next time I make a post....

For now the cutting, folding, linking and sewing of magazine pages has come to a stand still. It remains in the corner atop the basket of glue in the cutting room. The candlewicking yarn sits on the chair beside me awaiting the needle's company.

This is the Blue Bird of Happiness graph paper journal I made in exchange for some book cloth. The covers are made from some sort of fiber board that I believe was once the back of photo frames. I covered it with torn text from a book I destroyed when I culled the shelves back before Thanksgiving. The bird is done in acrylics atop the book pages. The inside and out of the back cover has layer of blue acrylic as well. It had graph paper and kid's writing paper for its 100 or so pages. It is, if memory serves me correctly, 8 x 5.5 inches. I sent it off to Canada this afternoon. Sewn together with orange embroidery thread in the coptic stitch.

I've been on book making spree. Owl book is made from the cover of a children's reading textbook from 1949. I painted them a shiny green with acrylics and assembled the owl out of construction paper before putting on details with a sharpie. I'ts sealed with Modge Podge. It has about 70 plain copy paper pages. Sewn together in the coptic stitch with orange embroidery thread.

I sewed the page block in this book a few weeks ago. I've no idea what that stitch is called...it produces a nice little book binding though. There are 10 signatures of manilla paper....100 pages. It's sewn with regular sewing thread and glued together and taped and and...it makes a great little book! It is the cover of this one that was giving me so much trouble. There were three attempts to make the cover before this one came about. It ended up being an old checker board covered in blue construction paper. It begs to be embellished.

I dragged out the polymer clay to finish a chunky page (which we have no picture of! I sent it on its journey this afternoon....dang!). I needed a charm for the danglies and it's always better to make a few things with polymer clay than to drag it all out and make only one thing.

They all started out as a lump of plain white sculpey. I left them in the oven a tad too long is why they are the color some of them are. I sent the hearts and the skull off with a package this afternoon. The smallest coffee cup went out with the chunky page we haven't a picture of. The other coffee mug will end up as a chunky charm somewhere down the line.

I needed to draw.