One Page Becomes Many

After a stormy night chased us all (except for one) from our September meeting at The Baird we met the following Thursday. We got up to speed with all the calendar changes, upcoming workshops, "stitch-it-ups" on the horizon, and plans for the 2011 "Booked" show. And then we exchanged the pages for the 2010 Collaborative project, "LUNAR - it's a Paper Moon!" This is only the third time I've participated, but once again I am amazed by the talent, creativity and care that participants put in to their pages. After focusing on my own pages for so long, and creating a twenty plus edition, suddenly in the span of minutes, an idea is transformed into a book (or will be soon) with variety and the personality of all the participants.

Great Listening Material ( Lynn Starun)

I stumbled onto a website of podcasts of interviews with book artists and papermakers by Steve Miller.  It's an impressive list including Hedi Kyle, Barbara Mauriello, Emily Martin and many others that you may not be familiar with.  Steve Miller is a book arts person from early on and runs a book arts program at the University of Alabama.  He knows and admires the people he interviews which makes for good interviewing.   You feel like you are sitting with them on a  porch in the Maine woods  with the birds singing or in a room near where workshops are going on at events like the Paper & Book Intensives.   I had a LOT of letterpress printing to do and this really passed the time.  You can download free podcasts or just listen right from the website.  I had never taken a podcast and put it on my iPod before but it was easy.   Here's the link:

http://www.bookarts.ua.edu/podcast/podcasts.html

Learning about transfer paper

Since I was sitting at home today for about the eighth straight day with laryngitis (it's no fun to go out into the world and not be able to communicate with people beyond a whisper and hand signs) I decided to check out the live web tv link that Karen sent out in an email to BAR members. It linked me into facebook, which was no problem because I'm already signed up there. Then, for just over an hour, I got to watch in real time, a series of crafters talking about some of their techniques. The last one, Lesley Riley, was the one that Karen was highlighting for our group. Lesley Riley has a transfer paper out called TAP (Transfer Artist Paper). During her share of the show she demonstrated the relatively easy techniques involved in printing on the paper via your inkjet printer (pigment or dye inks) and transferring the image on to cloth, paper, metal, plastic, etc. Of course I've ordered the paper and am looking forward to seeing how this works for adding text to my printed images for books.

Great Little Video

As you can see I'm trying to jump start this group blog thing. So, especially for the letterpress people, but for book people as well, here is a wonderful BBC video on Gutenberg which includes some craftsmen trying to replicate the Gutenberg press. Makes you want to go make a book!

http://www.dontpressme.com/video/gutenberg.html

Commenting

I've adjusted the comments to allow for anonymous posters so you won't have to do any passwords. I've left the comments unmoderated to allow for a free flow of discussion. If spammers show up then I'll have to start moderating which would be too bad. The blog allows for up to 100 "authors" so we may begin adding those of you who want to participate by making posts instead of just comments. I think to keep things manageable we should stick to Book Arts subjects, although if there is a person in the BAR who has had something like a medical crisis that others should know about it would be ok to mention that. If we do have trouble with spammers then we could shift to allowing only members to comment.

Our new blog is started!

Well,  I thought I'd just get this thing started and see what happens.  I'm sure there are many things that will have to be adjusted but if you find the blog please leave a comment.  The Bar had our March meeting tonight and discussed many things.    There were some interesting books shown and discussed.  Playing with Books,  Transfers and Altered Images, Print and Stamp??  and Print Pattern and Color all looked worthy of checking out.  I think what we can do is leave comments adding to what I've written.  If someone wants to make a post, perhaps they could send the post by email to me at lastarun at yahoo dot com and I can add it as a post to start a new topic.   We can add photos as well which should be fun.