catching up part two

Here they are, the real reasons I've been offline for the last few weeks:

one: a custom portfolio for Boston designer Deborah Wieder.

Deborah wanted to give her client, a local synagogue, a book both tangible and meaningful to hold her design work. The logo is raspberry and ochre, so Deborah found a lovely deep pink bookcloth, and I used several colors of linen thread--white, tan, ochre, and maroon--as accent. The binding is a kind of modified Japanese 4-hole binding, with a separate spine-pleat and hinged covers. The four threads gather together at the top station, and are simply knotted to make eight strands, as a reference to the tzitzit on traditional Jewish prayer shawls.

two: a custom wedding album for an old friend

Courtney wanted to give her newlywed-friends a handmade gift, and so approached me about creating a one-of-a-kind album or scrapbook for them. I'm sure I overloaded her with ideas, but she was definitely excited about the process, so played along. She found the cover paper--an indigo, carrot leaf-print lokta--and we settled on the buttonhole stitch for binding and Stonehenge for the pages. The result is a huge book: 12" tall x 12-1/4" wide x 1-1/2" thick. And it weighs almost three pounds! The buttonhole stitch is unique in that there's a hole in the spine, where the folds of the signatures show through. I like it because the thread binding the book together draws the eye from top and bottom to the exposed folds. It's a book that will cry out to be taken off the shelf!