two books meet .....

I love every aspect of books .... book covers, book paper and books sounds, sitting curled up with a book by the fire, rows of books on shelves, piles of books on floors, by the bed .... but just at the moment, I pretty much love Fiona's and my 'book meet days' best of all.  The hard work is done, we each know part of the others' book and in some cases have contributed quite largely to the making of that book.  However, the day they meet is the day all our hard work and pushing in different directions becomes evident in the final work.  

I think that is what makes these particular books we make so different (and yet really not so different from the way we normally work) - the fact that we are working to some sort of prescribed or dictated format - a prescription we have decided upon ourselves, or in the case of this last book, one we chose randomly from a set of cards that gave us the ingredients, or recipe for the making of this book.  It means that when you get stuck at a point, you have to work around it as this is a collaborative piece and therefore must be completed.  I know with some of my own work, if the direction in which I am heading becomes too hard, I simply change direction. Problem solved.  For me, the stumbling really came when I had to incorporate 'multiple openings' and realised that I didn't actually want to cut openings in my pages, or have little pockets from which I could bring forth additional work.  My solution will be shown more in the next post when we each show you around our books, but it is a solution which has already opened up another direction for me with my printing and so it is quite exciting.

Today was another happy day with Fiona here in my studio.  The books met and became friends quite quickly, and then Fiona kindly shared her internet skills with me by teaching me how to use 'Mailchimp' and 'Pic Monkey'.  Now that I have acquired this new primate knowledge, I will set about publishing my newsletter in the next week.  Fun.  Or it will be once all those names and addresses are in the address book .....

A glimpse of the two books.

Colours work so well together.

The two books sit well side by side ..... amazing really since we could have worked with completely disparate ideas.
I guess we did inside - our issues are very different.

I tend to be shifting towards a much softer palette these days.  Fiona's crisp colours on the right.

Just a tease .....

You can see my front page through the perspex covers - more detailed glimpses through a few 'openings' in the perspex.

And just a peep at gorgeous deckled paper edges.  Paper love.