First and Last

The first book I ever made, age 10 (in Miss Oliver's class at Lavender Junior School!) :

The autograph book's cover - just look at the quality of that stencilled writing!

The inside cover, signed by the class monitors!

My favourite little ditty by one of my classmates; oh to be 10 again!

The last book I ever made, er I finished it today...

I've made a notebook/sketchbook for the collaborative project
I'm working on with Chantal Brooks


The cover of the book is made of a body-printed waxed paper

A sneak preview of what I've done inside so far - not much!
You can just see that the book is made up of a range of
different hand-made papers, some of them are very transparent
and others are really textured.

It's been a pretty crap week all round, so what better way to forget about it than making something useful? Thanks to the lovely Chantal's brilliant instructions I think my latest version far exceeds the first version I made; I just hope it lasts as long! Actually, I did have another reason for wanting to practice book making - I plan to make some unique books (artists' books) soon. I've been thinking about it for a long time, but never got round to finding out how to actually make a book without all the paraphernalia, like presses, that you think you're going to need, but don't of course; sometimes we seem to make things so unnecessarily complicated. I'd also forgotten how therapeutic craft can be - especially when you know that you're going to get something good at the end of it, unlike a load of mangy old knitting full of holes and dropped stitches! It's great just to be able to lose yourself in something and suddenly realise you should have gone to bed hours ago, rather than sitting there clock watching (although I quite like watch clocking myself). Right, I'm off for a walk.