I’m holidaying in Bowral, and making books.
My friend Bronwen Black gave me a truckload of A3 and A2 calendars which were paper sample calendars from her day as a paper rep. I was overloaded and overwhelmed with the beauty of them.
In the end I had to choose one to begin with. This is its cover.
It’s Alice in Wonderland themed. There are some beautiful borders, although the cartoon like illustrations for each month don’t appeal to me.
So I took the embossed borders and made this. It makes me thinks of a wardrobe, hence its name, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (from the C.S. Lewis books)
I began with just playing with the borders. Went for a double
concertina, and then found this form. The individual concertina are
attached to another concertina like single flags. Then the “spine”
concertina is attached to the back cover.
I experimented with several colours before settling on the lipstick pink / coral because it looked best shown through the holes in the individual pieces. The front of each page in green is from the calendar. The back is shaded with a brown oil pastel that tumbled around in my pencil case with some turquoise oil pastels, so there’s a pleasing multiple colour surface going on.
I thought that the embossed side of the page would be the nicest but it ended up even better with oil pastel.
The book is 15 x 15 x 4cm. Next step is to make a slip cover so that in storage it will remain uncrushed.
