A Paper Daybook

I decided to get the long weekend started out right, with a bookmaking workshop. Our fearless leader was none other than Juliayn Coleman of Book Island Bindery and my classmates included Kate, a friend from my binding certificate program, and Courtney Cerruti of Paper Musings. What was the class, you ask? Upcycled Daybook, of course. 
The task before us at the beginning of the day was to disbind a book, add new pages, including calendar pages, and then rebind the pages using the original front and back cover into a daybook for 2013. Challenging but also oh so much fun!

Our books were childrens' books. Mine was a biology book called Your Wonderful Body.

The old pages were mixed with pages from other unbound books, and also National Geographic pages. I, of course, chose the dinosaur ones.

We punched new holes and, since these books were going to have spines thicker than the originals, we sewed on tapes for extra support. I got a little excited about all the pages I could include and ended up with 19 signatures! I was really glad to sew on tapes.

To make the cover, we cut into the old front and back cover boards so that the spine cloth could be tucked inside and create a smooth transition from old cover parts to the new ones.

Then we cased in and had our daybooks! Now, I admit, I use my iPhone calendar all the time, at work I'm addicted to GoogleCal, and my daybook is pretty large and a bit unwieldy to be carrying around all the time. Still, after the first 2 days of living with it, I'm enchanted. I'm still in the process of adding all the dates, but it's nice to be writing by hand. I have a really busy spring and, aside from appointments, I've added my to-do list for the past two days and it lowered my stress to see everything in a list and to be able to cross things off, in the 'real world'. So all you digital crazed folks, go get yourself a daybook, or, better yet, make one.

The Sketchbook Project

This morning I received a confirmation that the sketchbook I completed for The Sketchbook Project arrived in Brooklyn. If you're in the area, or will be visiting any of the tour stops this year (the tour begins in March), my sketchbook is located at call number 194.48-8. 
This was an interesting challenge for me, having to fill an entire sketchbook. It was also satisfying and extremely fulfilling. For my project, I cut words out of the Vogue September Issue 2012 then went back to the same magazine and found images that matched those words, in a way, and collaged them together to create little illustrated poems. My sketchbook will eventually be digitized, but I thought I would share with you some pictures I snapped of the pages in progress or just completed.

In the Bedroom

More home improvements were completed this week, the largest of which altered the bedroom. We live in a little Berkeley bungalow that is pretty old (first half of the 20th century, to be sure) and there are only 2 closets large enough to hold clothes. One is in the bedroom but is rather small, for me anyway, so Charlie uses that one. The other is the downstairs entry closet which more than accommodated all my clothing, but it's a bit of a haul from the bedroom when you just want to throw on some clothes, so we decided to remedy that.

I use the term we lightly here, as the great and wonderful Charlie did all the work. We built clothes hangers so that my clothing could hang along one wall in the bedroom--an 'open air' closet, if you will. It's great to have quick access to everything and to see all my options at once. It does feel a bit like I'm living in a boutique though.

Home Improvements

Life has been pretty hectic since July and I feel like we never fully moved in to our new place. We've taken our past few days off to make a few improvements to our apartment. 

First, I organized our bookshelves. Including adding new sections for artists' books, zines, and comics.

The studio has been feeling pretty crowded so we moved my yellow reading chair into the living room,

right by the paper fire I created to make our walled up fire place feel nice and cozy.

Tired of the kittens constantly knocking over our piles of DVDs, we found some cheap, fun, wall mounted DVD racks at Ikea that balance the DVDs between each crossbar and the wall.

For inspiration in the mornings, and when entering my studio, I hung my newest artwork, from Courtney Cerruti, on the small wall across from the bedroom door, and right by the studio entrance.

In the studio we mounted some new shelves to help me organize. The shelves were repurposed from a kitchen cabinet our friends discarded when they renovated their kitchen. 

The overhead lighting in my art room is not very good, especially for detail work, so we installed a few new lights above the window that shine down directly on the work table. They are great! Now I feel like I can make work after dark, which is especially important since after work is my main art making time.

From the Air

I love taking pictures from the windows of aeroplanes. There's something about not knowing whether the view is from coming or going. On our trip to Colorado, we flew over the Sierras and the Rockies. From the air, these could be mountains anywhere. I love all the potential stories you can make up from the ambiguity in photos taken from above.