ABCD Design Meeting

I have been commissioned, together with the ABCD group (which you can explore under a separate page in this blog), to make a large outdoor ‘book of memories of the Dove’ for our Amazing Space exhibition this autumn. Today was our first real design meeting, and Jane Paterson had made a model of a fold book based on willow/hazel wands construction, together with experiments on making the ‘pages’ (waterproof, windproof, printable etc etc). Here are the images:

Model of book design

Close up of a page framework

Design meeting

Wet strength tissue with mulberry paper and gauze

A sandwich of gauze, tissue paper and newspaper, a bit of gunny paper and emulsion

Printed muslin

Lunch! (always a feature of ABCD meetings)

Judith Staines had made paper out of processed willow bark (laborious but interesting), and Janine Barchard experimented with Ama Bolton’s idea of pressing and steaming bark between paper pages to create a stain image. Caroline Mornement printed onto muslin.

Forthcoming dates: on 19th June Jane Paterson is giving us an indigo dyeing day, as the colour blue will be a main colour in the design of the whole exhibition, and on 20th June we will be making the pages. All extremely exciting, and good to have the project underway after months of thinking about it!

(More photos and descriptions on Ama Bolton’s blog)

• artists' books
• handmade paper
• indigo dyeing
• janine barchard