today

For Neo Blue... today is his naming ceremony, his welcome to the world... 

If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too,

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,

If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

lobster!

A lobster book for a friend's birthday. She likes octopus and gulper eels, I hope she won't mind a lobster!

It's a Secret Belgium binding, the cover is made of three separate pieces which are then laced together...

And the pages are then attached by sewing through the cover threads...

It's my second try at this style of binding, and it took me all day! The sewing of the covers went fine, it's not really a complicated method, but as soon as I removed the tape holding the three separate parts in place it all went a bit floppy and the spine kept shifting.  

I managed to wiggle the boards a bit and line it all back up. I taped the book block (which I had previously sewn as I thought it would make it easier to assemble...) inside to keep the whole lot in shape, but this was no help as all the pages have to be laced into the spine individually with the cover open and tightened at the end... 

But I got there eventually, and I'm pretty pleased with the results... Rhonda writes here that she sews this binding in a different way to the tutorial I've linked to above, and that one day she may write her own tutorial... I can't wait!

practice

Paper, thread, glue. Board, buckram, glue. Ink. 

Practice.

hurray for sunshine

The clocks went forward the other day... and suddenly it feels like summer is here... I left work in the day light and walked home in the daylight, little pink flowers on the trees and a bee! So this is what it's like to be alive :)

I'm off to visit a friend in Glasgow this weekend, anticipating cups of tea and cake in cafes, walking in the park (in the daylight!) a bit of nice tasty food and a good old natter.

Enjoy your weekend!

expanded spine

Still working my way through Keth Smith's Non Adhesive Bindings Vol 1'... and its a long job! Today I had a go at an expanded spine concertina, and although the only thread I could find thick enough was some kind of scratchy gardening twine it seems to have worked ok...

I haven't put a cover on it yet, I think it will need to be hinged front and back to allow for the swell, or perhaps just shorter than the accordion so the spine extends past the covers... I particularly like the beading along the edges of the tapes (and it also just happens to cover the sewing holes which I accidently spaced a little too wide :) )

The spine is supposed to curve around like this...

I tried a few of my own variations of this binding idea... most of them I pulled back so I could reuse the book block, the last one I did is definitely not the most sucessful! Hmmm...

Looks pretty, until...

But it's an interesting structure, and although the expanded spine is wider than the covers at first, it leaves room for all sorts of things to be stuck between the pages...

experiments

In the print room where I work we try to keep toxic chemicals to a minimum. For etching we use copper etched by ferric chloride (much safer than traditional nitric acid which does all sorts of dodgy things to a person!) and follow the method explained by Keith Howard in his book 'Non Toxic Intaglio Printmaking'.

 

This method is fairly new to me, and so I've been messing about with some scraps of copper and different resists; varnish, acrylic paint, marker pen and vaseline...

I've found the vaseline particularly interesting, spreading it in a thin layer and using a pencil/needle/finger to draw through it and move it about on the plate... lots of potential there I think...

And what I'm really looking for is a kind of soft ground etching technique (as I sometimes find hard ground etched lines too fine; soft ground lines have a softer, blunt pencil like line which I like), vaseline seems to have potential for this too... any ideas?? 

Sorry if this is all a bit garbled, it's been a busy day... But there's nothing like a good old experiment is there :)

saturday

Rainy day. But I'm wrapped up cozy and warm inside, with a slab of chocolate wedding cake left over from my cousin's wedding yesterday and a nice big cup of tea :)

This is the present I made for them (and I did iron it and frame it before I passed it on, just didn't get chance to take a better picture...) It's the third sampler I've made up, a mixture of motifs from books and made up bits, and its a process that I really enjoy. In the past I've used graph paper to work out the design but this time I used the pencil tool in photoshop to colour in pixels... it seemed to work ok (although I'm sure there's a simpler way that I haven't thought of) It was helpful that each motif could have a separate layer and could be moved about freely.

The wedding was lovely (despite the rain!) It feels good to see the family I grew up with changing and growing and taking on new roles in life, and it felt good to celebrate that all together yesterday... and the cake was good too :)