Dear Everyone ~
Last week was my first week back in the studio after a restful post-holiday holiday. Cutting down all the papers for the Bookful of Accordion Art kits has been a lovely way to begin the New Year. It continues to be a thrill for me that Zoom enables simultaneous participation from enthusiasts in multiple timezones! For Bookful of Accordion Art, half a dozen students are in Canada and one adventurous student is in Westbury (close to Bath and Bristol!) in the U.K.
The accordion binding style is beyond versatile. Once you’ve mastered the steps, you can make your accordion as long as you’d like, thanks to a multitude of hinging options, including washi and decorative papers. You can make your books any size you’d like, any proportion you’d like, with a minimum of bookbinding arithmetic. I once made an accordion wedding album for a couple, using 2-inch wide gauzy golden ribbon for the spine hinges.
It’s always so meditative to see everything trimmed to size: stacks of Stonehenge, stacks of colourful Fabriano Tiiziano in the five palettes. A veritable buffet of assembling, wrapping, and packing to ship. Zak, recovered from his marathon yeoman performance manning the wrap ’n’ pack desk for the studio sale, happily helped trim all the accordion kit papers to size. I tissue-wrapped everything, and then Zak packed all the boxes, which I’ll be personally delivering to my preferred Post Office later today.
If you haven’t yet signed up for Bookful of Accordion Art, you are not too late. If you register by this Friday, January 15, there’s a high likelihood you will receive your kit before Workshop #1 on Saturday, January 23. All five palettes are still available: Venetian Lagoon (the most popular!), Albuquerque (in second place!), Wine Country, Bleu-ciel-rouge, and Promenade.
All four workshop sessions will be pre-recorded, and the recordings made available to students immediately after each session. This is an exciting innovation for Cat Bennett and me. We will still have our private Facebook group so that students can ask questions and receive our responses between sessions.
If you haven’t taken a Zoom bookbinding workshop previously, I think you might be pleasantly surprised, not only at the clarity of instruction but also at the real sense of camaraderie that develops and deepens over the four sessions.
Bookful of Accordion Art
Bookfully, Bari