don’t bleed on the paper! and other detours in the studio

All the craziness of the summer has begun to settle a little (still packing two kids off to college and working all day most days at the print shop). I have been able to finally get back into the studio, but  am finding it hard to get down to work. I wonder how many of you experience this – longing to get to your studio, making everyone nuts because you aren’t creating and then suddenly you get there and – nada.

This is not to say I have no ideas, I am just finding it hard to focus on things I should be doing, like tonight for example. I went up to the studio diligently, intending to finish a guest book I am working on for a wedding which I would have finished yesterday except for an incident involving a temperamental cat assistant and a very sharp scalpel – shooing her off the expensive, beautiful paper I accidentally impaled myself on the scalpel in my hand. My first thought was that I had better not bleed on the paper! The cut was deep but clean – and I guess by the start of classes this fall I will have a great battle scar and an excellent “runs with scissors” story for my students. (Do as I say, not as I do!!!) But it did bleed for quite a while and by the time it stopped I opted for bed not more work.

pretty excited about the future of these envelopes too

Tonight I toyed with using the lingering discomfort as an excuse not to even attempt any work in the studio, I had to drag myself upstairs with great reluctance, but some repetitive cutting – these (100) envelopes for another project – settled me down and I thought I would get that guest book done. Can you tell there’s a BUT coming?

Here’s what happened next… instead of cutting the paper for the book – I started fiddling around with the little strips of envelope on the bench.

Did you ever make one of those candy wrapper bracelets or baskets? I remembered seeing a binding in one of Alisa Golden’s book that was based on a similar idea, the folded loop locks together the pages and serves as a binding. Since I had all these strips cut already I decided just to give it a try. 100 folded envelope strips later I had created a cute little circular binding but it wasn’t very tight.

I wondered if I put a card into the little pocket created by the folded envelope strip I could create enough tension to keep everything nice and tight. Well there’s only one way to find out – so I cut a whole ton of catalog cards down to the right size and put them into the pocket pages! By the end I was cutting cards as fast as I could racing to see how this crazy little thing would turn out. I LOVE it!

I LOVE it!!

I am so in love with circular books right now and this has so much potential for development. Really it needs more pages to get the “binding” even and tight, but even so I am pleased with it! I am sure I can’t possibly be the first person to have done this, but I can already see that it would make a fun class.

 

 

 

 

Lastly before I close I just want to give a great big thank you to Seth over at The Altered Page for everything he does to promote a sense of camaraderie and connection, including his long running series “The Pulse”. Currently he is featuring still life photographs and this Sunday he will be including my still life – so if you want to know what I took a picture of – head over to his blog and find out – I’ll see you there! (I took that picture so long ago I don’t even remember what it looked like!!!)