Module 6 Chapter 10

A free standing display book.

I chose to make my book about Forge Valley, a really beautiful  area close to where I live.  There is a river running through it with a manmade boardwalk along one side, there is a little wooden bridge, a weir where the water runs fast, lots of wildlife and everything left to grow naturally.  Unfortunately there is a road running through as well which is used as an access to the roads going north of Scarborough and the traffic is busy and fast.  It makes walking along the road a bit dangerous but once you reach the bridge and can cross to the other side you can forget all about the cars and enjoy the nature around you.

I wanted to try and create the atmosphere of the valley, the tranquillity of the woodland and the lovely brightness of the green foliage in early summer.  I had put to one side two pieces of paper I had painted some months ago.  I think it was some left over paint and I just covered some wallpaper lining paper with it and dropped some cling film over it.  The resulting texture on the paint looked to me like a copy of one of my photographs and by adding a few lines in black ink I had created an atmospheric picture of the woods.

 

Unfortunately I can't get my photographs much better than this but the paper on the left has what appears to be a tree leaning across a river in a similar manor to the one in my photograph.  The other piece I think I considered to also be a river but when I turned it on its side, it became trees.

Having decided what I wanted to do on one side of my book I needed to work out how many pages, what size and what I would put on the reverse side.  I wanted to add some of the things you might see in the valley without going into masses of flowers and birds. I decided to make the whole thing from wallpaper lining paper as it is strong, takes lots of paint and paste and colours well. 

I next made a series of pieces of paper painted in shades of green to represent the valley.  Some of them I put cling film over and some I didn't.  I chose five pieces in all to make one side of my book.

I now have a size for each page plus a front cover and I have worked out where the folds will be. I cut a strip of paper the length I needed to make a central strip to attach my pages to.  I now had to decide what to put on the reverse pages.  I thought about birds and so I sat one evening and traced a woodpecker from a bird book that I have and I collaged it with papers from my box.  I was quite pleased with the effect and went on to make several other birds.  Some I had to enlarge and some make smaller so they are a bit random in their sizes but I was quite pleased with them. I made a background for the woodland birds from one of my earlier pieces in chapter eight and I used a painted piece of paper with a stencil for the river birds. 

I also liked the idea of lifting the birds up from the background to make them more 3d but that would be the last thing that I would do. These two pages above are separate and not yet attached to the book.  In fact, nothing gets attached to the book until every page is ready.  At this point my lounge floor is covered in papers, threads and various other items I might want to consider using.

The next two pages were to be on seeds and findings.  I had this piece of paper which is a natural fibre paper on which I have glued some strips of tissue paper then painted and printed over it all using dried leaves as print blocks.  I had one more piece of the paper left so decided to use that as the page on which to attach my findings.

Because the printed paper was a bit small, I had to add a border and I cut some strips of the natural fibre paper and put them round the edges of the centre piece.  The finding were first glued to the paper and then stitched round to secure them.

The last two pages were to be about flowers.  I wanted this to be a bit more delicate to reflect the subject so I found a nice piece of paper painted in pale colours.  Unfortunately it was just a bit short to make a double page so I would have to add something to each side to lengthen it.  The centre piece is strips of coloured tissue glued to newspaper background which has then been painted and hopefully represents a bluebell wood.  I wanted to put the wild garlic in, so I cut out a small portion of a photograph and stitched it in by adding more white flowers.  The marsh marigold makes another appearance, this time in chiffon, machine stitched and then cut out.

I needed to choose which other fabrics, laces etc. to add to the background to complete this set of pages.  The brown threads made a reasonable tree bark and led me into being able to use some bark rubbings I had made during a walk in the woods.  The only thing I had left to decide about on the inside of the book was some feathers I had collected.  I had a heron feather, a mallard, a wood pigeon and a magpie which I wanted to include with the birds but they were too big to attach to the pages so I decided to make a transparent nylon bag which I attach to the book on the fold where the two pages of birds met and this then completed the inside of the book.

The next step was to choose a border to surround each of the pieces of paper I had chosen for the front of the book.  I liked the spikey one I had done from the chopped up photocopy but it needed to be darker than black on white.

The border I had printed on the first page was quite nice but I needed something different.

This looked as though it would work.  Dark green background with black lines painted on.

 

This was the finished borders waiting for the green pages to be added to them.  Now for a front cover.  I wanted to used one of the photographs I had printed on the Khadi paper but as it was quite a bit smaller than my page size I needed a background and I had room for a title.  I made the background by making a montage of photographs, printing it out in colour then scanning it back into the computer and making it black and white.  I then made it a little bit fuzzy and lighter, printed it out and cut it up to fit around the photograph.

I wrote a title in Word in the style and size I needed and printed it part way down the sheet of paper.  I then covered that with a piece of painted paper slightly bigger than the text and sellotaped well down.  I then ran the paper back through the printer enabling me to get the writing onto the green paper which I then removed and was able to glue to my cover.

The last thing I needed was a means to hold the book together.  I hadn't used the bridge in any of my pages and to me it is an essential part of any walk in the woods.  I went back to my patterns I had made from the bridge designs in chapter 5 and decided to make a fabric piece using these designs which was then attached by machine made cords.  I made a long narrow tube for the cross pieces and two strips for the top and bottom rails.

The cords are wrapped around the book and the buttons then tied off to keep them tidy.  I have finished the ends with hazelnut shells which I found on the ground.
This was the point at which I started to assemble everything.  It didn't take long to do, waiting for the glue to dry was the long time.
So here are the finished pages.  I added a blanket stitch edge to this one and I raised the birds off the page by attaching them to small pads.

This shows the bag of feathers between the two pages.
Next are the seed pages.

Then come the flower pages.

 These threads are machine stitched to a piece of painted paper and a piece of coloured fabric takes the page to the end. 

 These are the tree rubbings I did which I have machined together and attached to the page

This side is finished off with a piece of matching blue fabric.

The finished inside of the book.

Now the outside.

 You can see a bit more clearly the trees by the river in this cling film print

This reminded me more of walking one of the mud paths with forget-me-nots and red camption.

Two more that give the impression of trees.

This is the front cover.

The finished front of the book.  I seem to have missed the front cover off this photo but it is on the left.

 This is the back of the book with the fastening

and this is the front of the book all fastened up.

This has been quite an enjoyable job to do.  The way I planned it, not completing any section until I was ready to do a final assembly meant that I never had moments when I thought I had done it wrong.  I have long wanted to do some work on Forge Valley and this together with some stitch pieces I did last year have finally resolved that need.  It has taken me longer than it should have done to complete the course but I have been able to do it in my own time which has been a bonus.  While it is good to work on a project on a daily basis, sometimes life can't afford you that kind of time.  I now have a collection of work books that I keep referring back to already and I am sure I shall use them over and over in the coming years.