Dear Everyone ~
Correspondence Album via group Zoom debuts March 23, coming up next Saturday, the first weekend of spring.
The structure students will make is a voluminous & voluptuous buttonhole-stitch album (9½ x 11½ x 2½). The octet of hand-folded envelope-pages can hold letter-sized sheets, including A4’s. The book’s spine is ’specially spacious (2½ inches wide), providing a fabulous file book for organizing your correspondence. You can, for example, assemble all the elements of an outgoing communiqué in an envelope-page. Or, you can file by element: stamps in one envelope-page; letter sheets in another; postcards in another; and so forth (and fifth…). Or, your album can become an incredible scrapbook or memory book of special correspondence received. I look forward to hearing students in the workshop describe how they envision using their books.
The completed album will be a papery patchwork quilt of eight different Cambridge Imprint patterns, tucked into a cover of indigo-dyed handmade paper from Cave Paper. My mini-rave about Cave: I find it beguiling—and beyond sturdy. I love working with it. Our interleaving sheets (16 pages/32 serendipitous sides) are Stonehenge with a deckled fore-edge. You can use these pages to record communiqués sent & received and/or to jot what-not. Kits are currently winging their way almost around the globe—to Canada and Austria, and to students from Hawaii to the Eastern seaboard.
The Correspondence Album will be the largest book I have taught via Zoom. I have already tested elevating my overhead camera to showcase my hands working with lusciously large full-sized sheets. You can read more about the structure and materials here.
If you’d like to try your hand at measuring, scoring, trimming, folding, and stitching a large buttonhole-stitch book, but you haven’t yet registered, you are not too late. A handful of kits are at the ready for extra-expedient expediting!
No previous bookbinding experience is necessary. The pace is calm and there will be ample time to ask questions whilst we work. I will live record this workshop session, and it will be available to you later the same afternoon to watch and rewatch at your leisure. If you have any questions now, please feel free to call or e me to discuss!
Correspondence Album
Feeling springy, Bari
PS:
We have yet MORE news in the envelope department! The kit for last week’s Hand-folding Envelope Happiness workshop debuted a new-to-BZS paper from India—a recent discovery by my postal muse, Alyson. (I was enveloped with ecstasy to receive her “twin-set” of test envelopes.) Students in the workshop ooh’d & aah’d and oh-là-là’d, and gave the Indian paper highest marks for foldability, glueability, and tactility. This joy has inspired us to brew up a trio of fresh (and fabulously foldable) palettes to complement or supplement our MORE Art of the Hand-folded Envelope kit, which we will present next week. The palettes will be available independently.