Colour in the garden

Primula

Hollyhocks

Rosehips

 

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Folded Secrets Book

Finally the third version of a folding book from the instructions in Ruth Smith's series of Folded Secrets booklets is finished. It took a long time as both fabrics and papers had to be printed and painted first. I choose to use my gelli plate for this and you will have seen details from both fabrics and papers here before. This version of the book comes from Ruth's book no. 3 and it is project 2 from this book. She calls hers: Folded Secrets Patterns and Ideas book. You can order Ruth's set of 4 books about folding and twisting from her by contacting her on eruthsmith@btinternet.com. She accepts payment by UK cheque or Paypal.

Above is the finished book. I found a large matching button in my stash for the closure and I used sari yarn too.

Here is the book as it looks when you open it, with one twisting pocket open too. As you can see there are 8 twisting pockets in total.

And underneath those twisted pockets are folding boxes, two smaller one and then culminating in one large one that is the one shown above. There are 2 of them, one on either side.

 A detail of the twisted pockets in their closed position.

Unlike the previous versions of folding books that I made, this one has pages as well as boxes and pockets and above and below are details of these pages that I spray painted with permanent inks and through stencils.

 Finally below a view of the back of the book, wrapped with sari yarn.

Having fun with the gelli plate

I should really have said plates in the title as a friend came over this morning to be introduced to gelli plate printing, so I had two plates out as well as a selection of papers and fabric. My papers were cut to exact sizes as they will be used to produce another folding book. It was fun seeing how someone else uses colours and as a result I even tried to be a bit more subdued in my colour usage too. But it's very difficult to go against your own nature and very soon I grabbed the brightest acrylics again. You can see stacks of the resulting papers above and below.

We used a lot of different mark making tools such as stamps, stencils (almost all from Stencilgirl) as well as Catalyst tools, old thread spools, top of bottles etc.

Both of us were very much into circles!

Beneath an example of one of my more subtle colour schemes and I have to say I do like what I have produced here.

But the best page of the session was this final one below.The colours just sing and it has ended up a wonderful mix of different patterns.

It was a very successful morning. I have the feeling that someone might well invest in a gelli plate very soon and we made an amazing amount of pages and fabric in a very short amount of time. That's what I love most about this method of printing.

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Folding Book 2

It is now quite some time ago since I showed you Folding Book 1 and promised to also show Folding Book 2. Somehow no. 2 lingered on my desk while other things to blog got in the way but now is the time to clear that desk in time for a New Year to start and here it is. It's made following a pattern in book 3 Paper Folding Projects of Ruth Smith's Folded Secrets book series. She calls this book Dragon Book with 19 compartments. You can order the whole set of 4 books directly from her at eruthsmith@btinternet.com. She accepts both UK cheques and Paypal. Contact her direct for all the information.

I have a hatred of white paper so I cut all the sheets to size and then coloured both sides of all of them, using the gelli plate and acrylic paint. A word of advice: let the paint dry completely before starting to fold them as otherwise they can be very sticky and cling to themselves and each other. Above you can see the book in it's closed position.

 When you open it up this is what you see.

 And folding it open even further you get your first glimpse of the 8 twisted pockets.

This is a closer detail.

And this is a view of one of the twisted pockets opened up (as well as the unhoovered rug!)

It's very hard to show how the folding works in still photographs but above and below are details of some of the large folded boxes opened out.

I have just cut up papers to make another project from book 3 i.e.  Folded Secrets Pattern and Ideas Book and will start gelli plate printing them to make that book in due course. So far, I haven't done anything else with these folded books. For me the fun is in the making but maybe one day I will start filling all those pockets.

You may have noticed that my Blipfoto widget in the sidebar has disappeared. The code no longer worked with the new website that is now up and running. I have been assured that new code will be written and it should be back and when it is it will reappear in my sidebar too.

I'm not universally impressed with the new Blip website, it has to be said. No doubt we will all get used to it but one thing that I take real exception to is the stark white background where before we had soft grey. From an aesthetic point of view photographs look much better against grey than white.  I'm not the only blipper to have a problem with it so hopefully we will get that grey back before too long.

Folding Book 1

This is not a day for outside photography, or in fact for being outside at all. I did walk Rueben but the greyhound had more sense than to venture into the lashing rain! So an inside photography project was called for. I had several projects to blog on my desk and this is one of them. It'a a folding book or container. Not sure what to call it exactly. You may remember I bought something like this (called a Zhen Xian Bao) with wonderful Miao embroidery on the outside while at the World Textile Day back in June this year. I became fascinated by how it was made and ordered 4 home published booklets called Folded Secrets from Ruth Smith who has investigated these book/containers in depth. If you are interested you can order them from her using this e-mail: eruthsmith@btinternet.com. She accepts UK cheques as well as Paypal. I experimented with her instructions and when I felt I had the folding under control I made this as my first project. It is the Folded Secrets Book with 15 compartments from her Book 1.

It seemed a bit boring to use white paper so I spray painted the papers first after I had cut them to the various sizes. This is what the book looks like when first opened. As you can see I also used a small heart stamp for decoration.

 The hearts conceal twisted folded pockets and you can see one opened up on the picture above.

Underneath the twist fold pockets are collapsible folded boxes as you can see partly on the above picture. It's quite hard to photograph and give you an idea of how it works but this is about the best I came up with. At the bottom is a very large collapsible box.

I added gelli plate printed fabric to make the cover and it also encloses the ribbon I added as a closure. The folding is at first quite awkward but once I mastered the technique it was much more straightforward to make the finished book/container than I had originally thought. I will be showing you more projects from Ruth's books in future.