Dear Everyone ~
This past summer I debuted the Mighty-fine-nine-signature-spine-book (MFNSSB) workshop via group Zoom. I had taught it in person pre-pandemic, and then Gabriele in Austria was my first Zoom student. You can read her delightful “report”, and see her beaming with her book, here.
In the group Zoom, we started by preparing our signatures, cover, stitching template, and spine…and then began to stitch our first three rows. Everyone stitched the remaining six rows on their own, with my video for reference. Some students completed their books that very evening, some a little later, and all were incredible to see! Yes, as usual, I requested photos of the finished books. What I really would have loved to see would be all the books lined up in a row! The five books at the top of this post were made by me, before, during & after the workshops.
Several students wrote to say how much they had enjoyed the process…and that they wanted to make more! Indeed, a couple of students had purchased extra kits before the workshop. Maria ordered two extra kits when she registered…and an additional four kits shortly after the workshop. She wrote: “The five books I’ve made have ended up in Northern England, Norfolk VA, Philadelphia, Florida, and Michigan. One friend has said she will use her book to write her favorite poems in. I am happy as long as they are used—grocery lists and to-do lists, the poetry of my life, are just as ok as poetry and drawings and calligraphy.” Maria’s aerial view gives me double Double Happiness!
Michelle e’d me to say: “I finally ‘finished’ my mighty fine nine signature book this morning. I had worked on the stitching and finished it the weekend of the workshop, but didn’t get it totally tidied up and pencil marks erased, etc, til this morn. I loved the class, and I found this binding challenging and cathartic at once. I enjoyed it so much. I really loved the complexity of the stitching aspect…and I love the color scheme. Exactly what I wanted!” Michelle’s shot of her spine is more than fine, it's divine!
Carla is perhaps The Ultimate BZS Workshop Enthusiast. She recently joked that she wished I had an Automatic Sign Me Up button she could just click on. She was in Chicago visiting her daughter at the beginning of September, and came to visit me at the studio on my birthday. She arrived bearing not only French macarons in a pastry box that she’d embellished with Cambridge Imprint scraps, but also her MFNSSB she had begun in the group Zoom, to show me. Here you see her at Bari Zaki Studio displaying her work-in-progress. She has now finished that book and made a second book! I asked her what she was doing with her MFNSSB #1, and she wrote back:
“ Yes, I’ve started using my first MFNSSB for daily, weekly watercolor practice. I’ve not filled many pages but decided I needed to dive with Cat’s voice in my mind! Since making the journal was such a learning process, I decided they were perfect books to use for practice and to experiment with watercolor. ”
My mantra for any book is that once you begin using it…it actually gets more beautiful! Yes, the book itself is a lovely object, but it is what’s inside that makes it engaging to flip through, and therefore memorable.
Emery, my nimble shop assistant & prolific artist, made her first MFNSSB back in 2018, and enjoyed using her book with reckless abandon—which I love!
Emery always has a sketchbook in her bag, and I’m perpetually curious to see what she's been musing about. She came to visit the shop recently, bearing two books she was at the beginning of stitching. She asked my opinion…and that reminded me that she had previously written me—with righteous abandon!—her musings about her process of using her many sketchbooks. In keeping with our theme, here are nine of her encouraging thoughts:
1.
Not every page needs to be a work of art. Especially not the first page. This, I know, is easy to say but a very difficult mental battle for some.
2.
If your biggest concern is accidentally drawing something ugly on the first page—you can solve that problem. You don't have to draw anything, and you can put something there that you already think is lovely.
When I do want to get started and don't have anything I really want to do, I sometimes just write on the first page that this book belongs to (your name here) as of xx date, and then I might do some squiggly border and call it a day.
4.
Or I just tape/glue in a bunch of things that I had been collecting for inspiration, like postcards, napkins, scraps of paper, a leaf, etc. If nothing else, it gets rid of the pile of pretty clutter taking up valuable real estate on my countertop.
It's ok that you don’t make everything. It may inspire or connect to whatever you choose to draw later. If this book was a gallery: you are the curator. It will all go together because the papers and leaves and postcards and doodles all have the same thing in common—you!
6.
I know it intrigues Bari that my sketchbooks tend to get very beat up. This is because I carry them around for a long time before they make their way to my sketchbook bookshelf.
I am usually carrying around 1-2 sketchbooks, the one I am working in now, and the one I just finished.
8.
Even when a sketchbook eventually finds a spot on a bookshelf, it will never stay in the same place. I am constantly flipping through them.
And the frosting on the Emmy cake:
9.
If I was drawing a bunch of cakes a month ago, and want to try it again today, I can go back and look at what I did before. I will pull all the parts I liked and try to see if I can do something I like better. Maybe I liked the cherries from one cake and the shape of a different cake, so let’s see what it looks like if I put those two together.
A mighty fine range of the MFNSSB’s I’ve made are now available in the online shop.
Bookish, Bari