Friday, October 26, 2012

Paper marbling

I haven't found anything as therapeutic & relaxing & beautiful in a long time.  I love that each piece is unique. I love that patterns look precise & intricate but still maintain that handtouched feeling.




Renegade Craft Fair Holiday 2012

I'm going to be selling handmade books & paper crafts at this year's Renegade Craft Fair in Los Angeles, December 8th & 9th.  My booth will be Keri (Contrary) Schroeder Book Arts & Paper Crafts, and will be full of origami jewelry, vintage Japanese fabric bound sketch books, homemade Christmas stockings!  I will be sharing the booth with ultracute plush items by merrilyyours.com. 




Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Little Red Riding Hood

This is a pop-up/accordion style book of Little Red Riding Hood.  I have been especially interested in the idea of using Fairy Tales as symbols.  Many stories have become so ingrained in our culture that simple references can unravel the entire story itself.  A pop up image of Little Red Riding Hood in a forest completes a self-contained, non-linear narrative.  This "theatrical" book format allows all the components of the story - the introduction, climax, and conclusion - to coexist in the same plane.




Saturday, May 12, 2012

Uncle Remus Rebind

Rebind on an old Disney Uncle Remus book.  The spine was missing & all pages were detached.  It had a compressed paper cover, so I removed the board from the cover & attached to a rebound hardcover book.  The endleaves were also illustrated & connected to the first page of the book, so those were removed & reattached too.  The new cover is bound in red bookcloth.  The new spine is foil stamped.






The Exquisite Corpse

Of course there's no such thing as book arts without surrealist games.  All pen & ink & paper.



The Itsy Bitsy Spider and Butterfly

Miniature watercolors on rice paper.  1"x2.5". 



Little Beetle

I just finished this small paper sculpture.  It's about 3"x4", made of various scraps of paper and one piece of plastic....  I pinned it down in a small shadow box.


Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Complete Rebind

This was the first complete rebind that I have done.  It was a pretty invasive repair, but the book was held together with scotch tape when I found it.  The book is "Poems by Edgar Allan Poe", published by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, New York, 1892. 

 

The book was completely separated from its cover, and the spine was missing.  The cover itself was originally bound in green silk with gold stamp trim, but was worn and soiled and held together with a huge yellowed chunk of tape.  The book itself isn't extremely valuable or rare and was in shambles anyway, so I chose to do a complete rebind. 


I started by carefully removing the original silk from the boards with a microspatula (a total pain in the ass, as you can imagine).  As luck would have it, a fellow binder that also happens to make historic costumes gave me a piece of antique green silk that matched magnificently.    I also managed to salvage the original endleaves, which are a pretty pea-soup green with gold embossed floral designs.  This was also done with a microspatula, and also a total pain in the ass.


I resewed the text block, but I didn't trim the pages because they had a nice gilded finish on them.  I bound the book in the antique silk, attached headbands of yellow-gold and dark green stripes, and added a soft, curved spine.  I rounded the corners but I think the binder's corners I used were a little too bulky, but too late to change my mind after I started.





I reattached the floral endleaves (not pictured here yet), and attached the original silk to the new cover.  The contrast isn't quite so harsh as it appears in the photos; the light just picks up every blemish.  Overall, not too shabby for my first complete rebind.  I think it maintains the integrity of the original, and now is at least usable.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

"How to Start a Fire"

This is a miniature book I made in 2011.  It is the size of a real matchbook, approximately 1.25"x1.5".  It consists of 10 pages with text and lino-block printed images on watercolor paper.  The pages are staple-bound like a matchbook.  

The text and images show step-by-step directions on how to start a fire.  Every other page has an block print image or one sentence: "Fire is necessary for growth.", "Anyone can start a fire.", "Sometimes all it takes is a simple strike.", "Contents under pressure are highly flammable."