taking shape .....

It has been lovely working with some different materials.  Though I have worked with copper shim before, I have never played around with aluminium and explored all its possibilities ..... or at least some.  I am sure that there would be so many ways to use this material.  It embosses, it is easy to draw into, it catches the light so gorgeously and that is what I love about it in this book.  It draws light into a book that has been quite painful in the making.

Each of the four sections has three folios - the inner one with the 'story' I am trying to tell about my father, the middle pages are embossed with marks and initials and the outer pages will be stitched with metallic thread in patterns that suggest the wave lines left in the sand as the tide recedes.

I have had great fun making marks into the back of the shim and then sanding the fronts.  The raised sections made by the marks seem to shine above the dulled background.  You can see below that having taken apart the metal book cover, I have made an insert which I will glue back in as the box is reconstructed.  I am happy with the way it personalises the cover and also ties in with marks I have made inside the book.

This page above represents the tombstone ...... a symbol of death. I have engraved part of Dylan Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gently ....' into the top half.  I wrote and overwrote the poem so that is obscure but I do love the marks it has left on the front surface.  An epitaph of sorts.

It has been lovely having this book to blog about as I have been fairly focussed the last couple of weeks.  I won't go on about it anymore and till Fiona and I have our book meeting day later this month.
I am hoping to finish the book today and put it behind me.  Move on to other things.  Already I am thinking about other things I can make using the embossed aluminium ..... and there is always the copper shim I have lying around.  I wonder if you can paint successfully on it ....... I know some of my copper has the remnants of printing ink left on it and that looks subtle and wonderful.  Will play around some more but if any of you have painted on or done something unusual with shim, please let me know.

making decisions ..... possibilities

I have been skirting around and around this book since Friday's play day with Fiona where we began our second collaborative book.  It was much more fun playing about with possibilities but I realised that  I actually did need to start turning some of those possibilities into realities.

Though I love the mica I could see no reason to have it sitting upon the page - other than the fact it just looked delicious!  I felt a little the same with the aluminium shim so I have decided that they need to overlap each other and that there needs to be some work done into the aluminium to give it a reason to belong on the page too.

My father loved birds, and trees (which I have suggested in a couple of the pages I have been working on)  but most of all he loved the ocean.  We had a gorgeous time together before he died down on the coast.  It was wild and windy and the ocean was grey and thumping.  I will be able to use that love of the ocean in other pages using thread to suggest tide marks and at the same time have them being a connection between the pages. Connections in families.

A long way to go still, but at least I have made a start.