Digest-ed

This weekend at the swan day event I had out some of my page meditations, I do so many of them that I am always a bit surprised by peoples reaction to them. So many people who stopped by exclaimed that they had never seen anything like them… They have become like breathing to me, a way to loosen up, switch to studio gear and really listen to the materials. I love to just sit with a page and see what swims up out of the text.

So, this past week when I wanted to experiment with a new book form (new to me that is) I grabbed some pages from a readers digest to play with.  This book with wings is from Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms by Alisa Golden. (I have an earlier book by her, and I love her diagrams.) To make it you start out with squares of paper, then fold the corners in to the center.

After I had folded several pages and had a feel for how the book would look, I decided to go ahead and work the visible part of the page.

Which is where the idea came from to alter a whole story from the reader’s digest in this way and make a digest-ed version. And like all of my ideas, it seemed like such a good one at the time!! Each altered page takes 30-45 minutes to complete, and the story had 50 pages without illustrations, so now I am at least 25 HOURS into this project, not counting time for cutting and gluing!

I love how it is turning out, but as I was working on the altering I felt like it needed some stitching too, so stay tuned… more developments to come! How do I get myself into these things… did I mention I need to finish it this week, as it will be hung in a show next week? Yeah!