Weekend Creativity

This was aa lovely, (BUSY) long weekend, thank you Mr. Columbus. I saw my new niece, Sydney, at one day old. Went sailing for what might be the last time this year. Cleaned the basement (and oh, did it need it!). I filled the outside trash can, which we never do, and filled two recycle bins, and then filled the back of the van with stuff to drop off at Salvation Army. I still have too much stuff and yarn, but I'm getting there.

And am making plans to start giving some of it away to you guys.

Oh, and I finished a batch of books I'd been working on.

The big blue one, with the nuclear plant title is one that I gutted and refilled. First time I ever tried it, and while there are things I'll do differently next time I work with a pre-used case, I really like it and it makes me smile. It's about 6.5" by 10" tall and has 5 signatures, which totally fill the casing.

The brown square one is covered in bookcloth, and measures 6.5" by 6.5", with three signatures. Both the brown and the blue are filled with Fabriano Artistico watercolor paper that I found on clearance for only $1 a sheet! I bought all they had - 11 sheets . It was a slightly wasteful project, as I now have 5" wide strips of Fabriano with the grain running in the wrong direction for binding books, unless they're really tall and narrow! But I have 11 of them, and I have to be wasteful!

The two smaller square books are filled with Arches Textwove paper. I've never tried it before, and thought I'd give it a go. These two little books made full use of five sheets, each four signatures thick. The one with brown corners is covered in a marbled-look thick art paper I had hanging around, and the corners are scraps of brown bookcloth. The other is another pretty art paper I had in the studio (ok, humor me, it's my now-clean basement!) with imitation bookbinding leather for a spine accent.

Al four books have endpapers cut from a huge map of Lake Michigan that was in the recycle bin at work. I pulled about 2 dozen different maps of the Great Lakes out of the bin and have had them rolled up and tucked away, waiting for the right project.

My motivation in getting these books bound and ready was that I was stalling in my current sketchbook and the poor thing was languishing. I wasn't drawing! I wasn't writing! And when I finally asked myself why I wasn't drawing or writing, I realized it was mainly because I didn't have my next book picked out and ready.

Now I do.

Which one do you think I chose for my next book?