Ode to studio piles

I have a craft show in 1 1/2 weeks and I am stressed out. Anticipation of the first show of the season always makes me a bit wacky. The truth is, I’m in pretty good shape as far as inventory, but I’m not where I want to be.
And that’s located somewhere in the land of [...]

Trip to Taurus Bookbindery

The Guild of Bookworkers is presenting their annual event, The Seminar on Standards of Excellence in Hand Bookbinding, in San Francisco starting today. As my trip to Taurus Bookbindery was one of the stops on my bookbinding spree in San Francisco this summer, I felt it necessary to finally write about my visit.
Taurus Bookbindery [...]

American Art Therapy Association Conference 2009

Every now and then, I experience a bit of longing for my days as an art therapist. I’ve long believed in the healing power of art and my chosen career path as a bookbinder has definitely been influenced by my graduate training.
I remember when I proposed the thesis topic of using bookbinding in the expressive [...]

Peggy Skycraft is so cool

I mean seriously cool.
Peggy Skycraft has been making the most gorgeous marbled and painted papers since 1970. She is considered a master marbler and if you look at her work, you can see why. I became acquainted with Peggy’s work when I worked at Paper Source in the mid-90’s. From the moment I saw her [...]

Book Artists on Twitter – part 3

Alas, this will likely be my third and last post about book artists on Twitter (part one, part two). I have not, however, given up on sharing book-related Twitter peoples.
What is this crazy lady talking about?
I am one of the lucky schmoes chosen to test out Lists, a fabulous new feature in Twitter that allows [...]

Bookbinding bad habits – a winner

And the winner of the bookbinding bad habits giveaway is…

Liz Conley!
Congrats to Liz and many thanks to all of those who were generous in sharing their bookbinding tips misdeeds.
By the way, I’ve got another one…
My understanding is that you’re not supposed to wash your glue brush with either hot water or soap.
I do both. And [...]

More information on Paper and Book Intensive 2010

I was just going down the internet rabbit hole and I ended up on the Paper and Book Intensive website. It’s been a while since I last visited and I was happy to find that they’ve announced their instructors for 2010:

Frank Brannon – books
Carolee Campbell – books
Melissa Jay Craig – books
Tatiana [...]

Julie Chen fans – welcome!

I was looking at my blog stats this morning and noticed that a large number of people were doing searches on Julie Chen of Flying Fish Press. I finally figured out that last night, folks had watched Craft in America, a documentary on PBS on which Chen was featured. Since she’s super-fabulous, of course people [...]

Peek-a-Boo Journal class – Day 1

Last Thursday I had the first of 2 sessions for my Peek-a-Book Journal class at Studio Place Arts in Barre, VT. Here’s what everyone is working on:
As I’ve mentioned before, I can’t write a post about a class unless I have the obligatory photo of my supplies looking all fresh and sexy:
I developed a [...]

Bookbinding bad habits – a giveaway

While I was teaching my workshop at Studio Place Arts last night, I realized that several times I prefaced a technique with the following:
This is how I do it. You may take another workshop and they’ll tell you that you have to do it a different way. I’m not sure how I learned to do [...]