My first hand-stitched book.

Awhile back I attended a conference on how to make hand-made books.   Focus on Book Arts  (https://focusonbookarts.org/)  offered many classes on hand-made books —  how to fold, structure, stitch, and bind, as well as exotic techniques for the more advanced attendees  (Chinese Thread Books, Pop-Up structures for miniature books, Jacob’s Ladder book structure, etc.).

FOBA was a great environment for learning and sharing skills and experience with like-minded “arteests.”  I am still in touch with a few of them.

Thanks to FOBA  (and my independent urge to try new things) I have a formidable stash of content for the inside pages of a hand-made book. My grandfather the Trainman seems to admonish me for not memorializing him yet in a bound book.  He, along with my poems and other family vintage photos that I transferred onto fabric, remain buried in shoe boxes and plastic bins.

I feel some angst over all of this material.  Why, out of all the FOBA classes that were available to me, did I avoid learning to structure a book to incorporate these scraps from the past?  I have toyed with the idea of  rendering them in PhotoShop and Lightroom and digitizing them into a book via blurb.com.

At some point, I may try that.  But at present,  I have fancy ideas that conflict with the idea of using an on-line service to build this book.

Me and my fancy brain.

My mind wanders back to 1970 and Mrs. Kane’s Home Economics sewing class.  Ah, if it weren’t for those memories, I might have happily enrolled in FOBA’s book stitching classes and by now would have a more permanent memorial to the ancestors.

No … wait. It wasn’t Mrs. Kane’s class. It was the sewing machine that my Father won at a Knights of Columbus raffle, the machine with the bobbin from hell.  It tangled incessantly and I never finished making a basic shift dress.

Oh what a web I weave … it was Mrs. Kane and my Father.

I now have a workable Pfaff sewing machine and make things like curtain valances and pillows. But I still have a love-hate relationship with sewing.

So recently I reached out to a friend I made at FOBA, Jackie, who in my eyes is the Queen of Book Structure and Stitchery.  Jackie covers books in cloth and paper and knows accordion folds, Coptic and long stitches, and even Japanese book binding.  She is a marvel.

“Sure, come over,” she said.  “We’ll each make a long-stitch book.”

I was successful — if you consider six hours of intense neocortex work (“first you fold the paper in half, then you fold it in quarters…after that you create five signature pages…we put them in the bookbinding cradle…watch out for the thread catching in the wrong hole”) to be worth it compared to a few hours of PhotoShop,

Let me get back to you on that.

Though the feather-papered book is very pretty and I want to write poems in its pages, I envision the ancestors in more of a parchment/sepia design.

I’ll probably stitch n’ bitch till the cows come home.