As promised - but a day late -

a new book. And as a bonus for waiting - a second one.

A while ago I bought 'Book Arts - Beautiful Bindings for Handmade Books' by Mary Kaye Seckler, sight unseen, on the basis of a sample I found on the web. When it came I was disappointed because it seemed very prescriptive. When I looked at it again and got beyond the 'use this paper, this stamp. this ink pad and make it this size' - there are some interesting ideas. So these are my first two efforts from that book.

Here are the bits of the first one. Inspired by the little books I saw at the Odyssey exhibition, and my white book, this was going to be a brown book with tiny pieces of stitch in it. Then I glanced out of the window, saw the leaves beginning to turn - and it morphed. A lot of sticky leaf printing later, this is the result. It even has a title - the first time I have ever named a book.

The larger pieces of paper at the top in the first photo are not part of the book but my Yorkshire streak making me use up every splodge of paint. I made a monoprint using the leaves as a resist. The back of this is quite interesting too as I used the brayer I'd spread the paint with to press down the paper, and got a sort of leaf rubbing with the paint left on the brayer.

I made another monoprint with the leaves removed, and then squeezed a last few leaf prints onto some lightly gessoed paper -where I had wiped the gesso brush at the end of a previous session - do you see a theme here?

The second book grew from a reference to using map paper in Seckler's book - she calls her version 'Atlas' Secret'. I had an old road atlas rescued from the recycling pile, so instead of just the concertina spine being made of map paper - it all is. It was going to be random pages from the atlas but then it fell open at our favourite bit of mid-Wales - which ended up on the cover. Most of the inside pages are also of Wales but a few are the English side of the border and one tr two, due to the nature of atlas making, are East Anglia.

The binding needs a bit of adjustment and I think I may gesso some of the inside pages, decorate them, and then add some of our photos. We have been going to the area since Babybel's Daddy was a bun in my oven so we have several photos taken over the years ...