what I did on my summer vacation

Happy first weeks of school y’all. This means summer is over. I really did have the best summer. I look back and I think wow, I can’t believe it’s over and I can’t believe I got to spend it with so many amazing people making art. If every summer could be this way, I couldn’t ask for anything more. To review, this summer I made an order of 2,500 handmade books for Anthropologie which I told you about earlier. What was even exciting about this is that I actually finished the project, what was remarkable was the actual process and the amount of people who helped. Bookbinding is usually a pretty solitary activity and taking on an order like this for a one-woman shop is no easy decision. When I said yes to this sweet job, I knew it meant basically the summer would be filled with just this one project. I have to say it was really nice to have the luxury of focusing on just one thing if only for a short while. One thing at a time is just fine to me, or one book at a time.

Below are some images from the summer, a collection of photos taken while in the throws of making and sewing and gluing and stamping and printing and painting and coordinating. It was a really good time and I wasn’t nearly as good as I wanted to be about documenting the process so it is spotty but there are some nice shots of the poet books while they were being made.. Next post up will be shots from the tree books and their own road to completion.

: Stacks and stacks waiting to be stamped and bagged.

: i like seeing them all standing at attention like this as we allow the inside stamp to dry before putting them in their little plastic sleeves.

: The book blocks had to be wrapped with the blue and pink papers on the edges before I could get to gluing and pressing the books.

: After painting the boards with the background color it was time to add the turquoise to the edges. Painting the edges of over 800 boards proved to be more tedious than I thought. I did not like it one bit.

This was a smaller edition of 425 books so I decided to hand stamp these front covers myself using stamps I got made. I liked doing this because I could really keep some of the uniqueness of each cover. They got better and better as I got used to what the paint would do after a first second or third impression with the ink.