Prompt Challenge: Truss

I’ve challenged myself this year to use a different word each week (the word featured each Monday on dictionary.com) to get me into my studio and developing some new ideas. My first word was truss. I thought that if nothing else came to mind, I would use the meaning “to tie, bind, or fasten” to sew an interesting binding on a blank book. I wondered if I could use whatever pattern one might use to truss a chicken. But a Google image search for truss brought up only pictures for the engineering or architectural meaning: “any of various structural frames based on the geometric rigidity of the triangle,” in particular for bridges.

Pyramid Power: the hinged triangle book from Karen Hanmer

This lead me in search of book structures with triangular pages. The one above is an elegant triangle book by Karen Hanmer (She has a lovely gallery of her work on her website.)

Dennis Yuen’s triangle book Daily Threads Origami Triangle book

Or, on the left, Dennis Yuen’s book with triangle pages and coptic binding. Right is an accordion triangle book by Lolita of Daily Threads.

Fisher Covered Railroad Bridge, Vermont

But as I stood at my bench making models of triangle books, I kept thinking about the covered bridges I visited in Vermont this past summer. Especially the one above close to my sister’s that was unusual for being a railroad covered bridge. And a haiku I had written about the bridge

Abandoned bridge.
A view into
yesterday.

That’s when I hit on the idea of using a turkish map fold (more on how to do this fold later this week), which involves triangles. And I was lucky enough to find photos online of views looking into and out of the bridge (of course the pictures I took were only of the outside!) Here’s the results:

truss-1.jpg
Partially open

truss-3.jpg
Fully open

truss-2.jpg
the back and front covers

The word for next week: heterotelic, adj. Having the purpose of its existence or occurrence apart from itself.

Prompt Challenges

The Exquisite PromptRecently I ran across a phrase new to me, prompt challenge, on this blog. The “challenge” is to create something based on a regularly scheduled prompt or idea. I poked around and found some other challenges

I’m sure there’s lots more…. I’ve been thinking I’d like to motivate myself to do a quick something each week. So every Monday I’ll use the “word of the day” on dictionary.com to inspire a book, haiku, collage …. for that week. The following Monday I’ll post a picture of whatever I’ve done. Hopefully I can keep it up most of the year!
If you’d like to play along, the first word is truss, to tie, bind, or fasten. There are more meanings here, for instance, in horticulture it means “a compact terminal cluster or head of flowers growing upon one stalk.”

Paula Scher’s Maps

details of “Tokyo,” 2008, by Paula Scher“I began painting maps to invent my own complicated narrative about the way I see and feel about the world. I wanted to list what I know about the world from memory, from impressions, from media, and from general information overload. These are paintings of distortions.” — Paula Scher
Since the early ’90s, Scher has been painting colorful depictions of regions of the globe, covered from top to bottom by a scrawl of words (to the left is the details from the 2008 painting “Tokyo”). She has recently published a book of her maps. There’s an interview with her here and large glorious pictures of her maps on her website.