Monday, January 11, 2010

This is a photo of a little clay book I made. It's only 2" tall and about 1-3/4" wide. Isn't it sweet?

The photo doesn't show it very well, but the cabochon on the front has dichroic glass in it. The covers are made from slabs of oven-fired clay (not polymer) that are whitewashed after drying and baking.

The signatures inside are made from joss papers, pages from an old dictionary, and other recycled papers. This was the first time I used the coptic binding and I'm not sure I got the wraparound stitch correct. The You Tube video was very helpful, but it assumed a certain level of experience with book binding I simply did not possess.

This probably won't be the only clay-covered book I make, but I'm certainly not going into production! It took more than a year for me to work up the courage to try the binding and only about 15 minutes to bind all five signatures in place. Why do I put these things off?