April is National Poetry Month — lots of ideas on how to celebrate here. And April 17th is National Haiku Poetry Day. I enjoyed looking at the haiku contest winners and comments from previous celebrations.
Month: April 2012
Deepak Chopr’s Map Fold Book
Most people find my shop in a very mundane way — a typical response to “how did you find me” is “I searched for ‘artist book’ on Etsy.” But last week I got an unexpected and pleasant answer from a woman who bought one of my bookmaking kits. She told me that she had seen a charity auction for The Lunchbox Fund that included a book of images and eight meditations handwritten by Deepak Chopra. She went on to say “I so enjoy origami and this book enchanted me by the way it was constructed. I googled the Turkish map fold and selected the images search. I clicked on one of your photographs and checked out your website.”
Intrigued by the Turkish map fold reference, I looked for the auction, which had just ended. The book went for $820! Here’s the description as well as nice photographs showing the book opening…
Reflecting on the personal journey, each page is folded into a Turkish map and arranged as an accordion which bursts open, blossoming to reveal the colorful text and images within. The covers are embroidered in a floral motif with stem and running stitches in cadmium yellow on Marc Jacobs teal wool cloth and mounted onto Japanese Unry-shi Kozo board. 5” by 5”. Made in collaboration with Alaska L. McFadden. Auction photos by David Belisle.
Do also check out Alaska McFadden’s website and her other books.
Prompt Challenge: Catechize
First, a fun fact: catechize was first used in the sense of “to question” by Shakespeare in Othello (Act 3, Scene 4). Desdemona is looking for Cassio and she asks the Clown if he knows where to find him:
DESDEMONA: Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN: I will catechize the world for him, that is, make questions, and by them answer.
I was pretty stumped by this week’s word, until I reread the definition and saw the synonyms: interrogate, quiz, examine, probe. I decided then to concentrate on the question/probe part of the definition.
Every year about this time, I start working on my calendar design. And every year I try out some layouts that aren’t my usual 12-pages-with-haiku-and-design-that-fit-in-a-plastic-CD-case. Regardless of the layout and size, haiku is always an element, and one of the big challenges is to write poems that are worth reading and re-reading and contemplating for an entire month. For this week, I attempted to substitute pithy (but not too serious nor too silly) questions into my layout, rather than haiku.
The layout I’m working with groups the months into 4 sets of 3 months. For each set, there are 3 related collages that overlap by using longer and longer pages, so that the bottom of the 2nd and 3rd months can be seen while looking at the first month and the bottom of the 3rd month can be seen when viewing the 2nd. I mocked-up one set, April, May and June….
The challenge, though, was the questions. Here’s the three I came up with:
- What super-hero would you be, what would your costume look like & what would be your motto?
- What’s your first memory?
- What’s the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to you?
Next up:grouse, v; To grumble; complain.
Popups
I’ve got a few ideas for pop-up books, but when I run across them in in my notebook it’s not long before I remember how much work they are to construct, since I hand-cut all the pieces. I’ve been thinking about getting a die cutting machine that will cut pieces directly from Illustrator. Mary Jeanne Linford uses this fancy one to make her pop-up books. She has some nice youtube videos showing them off:
- No Dog, No: six reasons not to own a dog
- Tools, a popup about carpenters tools
- A Bainbridge ABC, a ABC book about Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Here’s a still from the tool pop-up
