Threadless

This may be more relevant to the screen printers of the world than the book-makers, but it seems like something you all might enjoy . . . In fact, I have the feeling it's probably something you already know about, switched-on, plugged-in hep cats that you are.

Threadless sells t-shirts designed by visitors to the website. You can submit your t-shirt design, and if it gets enough votes, they pay you and start printing it. There are also prints on paper. Some of them are pretty fantastic. My favorite might be Mister Mittens' Big Adventure, although it's hard to pick.

Anyway, just thought it might be incentive for those of you who were thinking about rigging up Amy's home silkscreen . . . or maybe just for those of you who want fun t-shirts. I wonder if there are others websites that are running this sort of operation . . .

July 9

Happy
Birthday
Carlea!

We miss the studio... but Astoria will do

Not directly-related to bookmaking, but...

Since some/many of you may have occasionally/often found Joanlie and I in the studio at 3 in the morning listening to Jeff Buckley and making books, here is a photo of of us awake at my apartment in Astoria at 3 in the morning listening to Jeff Buckley and painting our nails:

We miss you all so much!

My roommates and I had an apartment-warming party the other night and the food we served included the amazing goat cheese Kris served us at her house, and the scrumptious brownies Carlea baked for our show. Artist Books was a culinary inspiration as well as a creative one.

Love,
Ali & Joanlie

A portable bouquet book

I put this book together the night of spring formal, just for something to do. It's not very fancy, but I thought I'd share it here since it's been a while since I posted anything.

The cover is pink construction paper, with flowers cut from a catalog. It's covered in clear packing tap to "laminate" it and bound with regular sewing thread in a single-signature of plain computer paper, cut to size. It's not quite 5" square (about 5 1/4" wide, 4 3/4" high), and 40 pages (10 sheets).

I had to use 3 strips of packing tape for the outside cover, folding them over the top and bottom and the side edges, and then two more pieces for the inside cover. It's a bit of a mess, since I did it on the floor, and it picked up all kinds of dust and grit on the tape. Obviously I didn't plan that one out very well. But I really like the shine it gives the cover. I'll have to look into other methods of laminating covers--short of buying a great, big laminating machine.

I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Maybe use it as an address book. I'm not sure. It's far from perfect, but it was fun to make. With the exception of my mat (a tiny little thing, only about 12"x12") and a knife, everything I used was just stuff I had lying around, and it was nice was to reassure myself that I can still make books without a proper studio.

On another note, my friend Kristin sent me a link to Rope-a-Dope Books, a small publishing co-op in Boston. There's not a whole lot to look at on the blog, but I thought it was worth passing on.

And speaking of links, I've been slowly compiling a list of book arts-related websites and blogs and things, so if you have any resources you like, let me know, either in the comments here or by email.

Brian Dettmer

The first artist featured on the list of unusual books I linked to the other day is Brian Dettmer.

As it turns out, he seems to have some work showing at a gallery in Manhattan, Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen, so those of you who'll be staying in the tri-state area could go check it out in person. For those of you departing New York, there's his Wikipedia page and a bunch of pictures of his modified books to console you.

Ms. Precious

Kris sent me this amazing picture of Elizabeth, a.k.a Ms. Precious, which I think we will all enjoy.












That is all.

109A!

Hey, all! Ali and I talked about starting a blog for our class, so here it is. It's called 109A, so it'll be like we never left the studio at all. Possibly that's a little perverse, but Kris says never apologize for yourself, so there.

For your perusing pleasure on this inaugural post, a collection of The Most Unusual Books in the World, courtesy of Kristin Maffei. I'm not quite sure why some of them are supposedly unusual, but my personal favorite is the teeny-tiny New Testament. And one book that isn't on this list but should be is Well Done, a book that must be baked before it can be read. Oh, yeah.

So I'm just getting started here. If anyone has any ideas about how to make the blog better, say so--Lauren, I know you know your way around Blogger better than I do, and Ali, you design minx, I'm sure you have something to say.

More links about books and book arts coming soon. If you come across any interesting book stories, send them along. And, of course, what this is really about is the books we've been making since the end of Kris' class, so send pictures or bookmaking anecdotes. Maybe I'll finally tell the story of my corn palace.

I'm gonna miss you guys, but not really because you're gonna send me pictures of all your new projects, right? Right?