PULP paper goods shop opens in East Nashville

When your awesome new store brings out all your friends and a bunch of local book artists and printmakers for an opening night party — and your store is 200 square feet — it makes for a shoulder-to-shoulder party where almost everyone knows everybody's name.

That's how Jessica Maloan opened PULP on Friday, the first paper goods, prints, cards, and handmade books shop in East Nashville. Jessica, who prints as Pine Street Makery and helps organize Porter Flea shows, has become a close friend. Her knew store, about a mile from my home, shows her eclectic tastes and curator's eye. The opening is the latest good news for the neighborhood, and a nice complement to other new openings nearby, like Hey Rooster General Store.

Leading up to the opening, my own excitement grew as I shuttled some of my books, prints, and paper scrap packs to Jessica during the week. I got to see the final touches come together. Bright paint on the wall, followed by prints hung with care. There's great work here by Little Things Studio (recent transplant to Nashville), Camp Nevernice, and Sawtooth Printhouse.

For PULP updates, visit the shop on Facebook and then stop by at 729 Porter Road.

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From sketching to screenprinting: A unique Coptic bookbinding project

It's no secret that I'm enamored with decorative and handmade papers. After all, the name of my studio, linenlaid&felt, is all about paper textures: linen, which is embossed with distinctive weaves; laid, which features impressed lines; and felt, with its mottled texture.

However, even with all of the gorgeous papers that are available, some patterns do surface often in bookbinding. That's why I'm so excited to share one of my recent projects.

I wanted to create something really unique, that no other book artist would have. I wanted to create my own patterned papers. This would allow me to bind books with all of the materials purposefully chosen, right down to patterns that I illustrated and printed by hand.

Inspired by a recent exhibit at The Frist Center in Nashville, I completed a series of sketches, followed by inked illustrations, then screenprinting onto papers and leathers, and finally books bound with those materials. A handful of these unique books are now available in my Etsy shop.

Here's a look at the process, step by step.

Step One: Sketching

Inspiration first struck during a visit to the Frist's Art of the Ancient Americas exhibit. I think I've always enjoyed ancient art more than most friends my age, perhaps because of the incredible collection that I grew up visiting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

After seeing the exhibit and a guided tour one time, I returned with my sketchbook (yes, one that I made by hand) and got to work on some sketches. I captured some shapes from Peru, took interest in a ceramic llama, and took a few turns drawing some Mexican homes. Ultimately, an Aztec pottery pattern was among many inspirations blended into patterns.

Step Two: Ink illustrations

On the day I pulled out my India Ink it didn't take long for every surface in my studio to become filled with illustrations that needed to dry. For some, I worked meticulously with a pencil grid, but for others, I worked very quickly, making slashes, dotted and dashed lines, and vaguely organic shapes.

Step Three: Screenprinting

If you've never screenprinted before, I can briefly describe the process. First, I turned my inked illustrations into transparencies using a photocopier. The transparency is then placed onto one of the fine mesh screens used by printers, which has been treated with light-sensitive emulsion. The screen is then exposed to light, which burns the pattern into the screen. When it comes time to print, ink can only pass through the areas you've chosen based on your pattern.

I took care to mix my own inks in colors to coordinate with all of the handmade Lokta papers that I brought into the print studio for this project.

I printed nearly 100 sheets and also dabbled with screenprinting onto leather.

Step Four: Binding

Once I had all of these materials at hand, I had a lot of momentum to begin binding. I also used this as an opportunity to sift through my paper collection to explore color combinations. I also decided to use the four-needle Coptic binding style, which allows for two thread colors along the spine, and a chance to go even further with color schemes while quite literally bringing everything together.

I'm excited to use these screenprinted papers in the future. For now, I've bound four Coptic books with the screenprinted papers, and four with screenprinted leather covers. I hope you'll take a look at each one in the shop and share them with friends!

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Porter Flea AirCraft market — in Nashville June 1

Porter Flea Handmade Market — Nashville's best handmade craft show — lifts off soon, promising to be bigger and better than ever. And I do mean bigger. More vendors than any of the first four Porter Flea events will come together June 1 in an unimaginably large venue: three airplane hangars!

I've been busy preparing, because this show has done nothing more than grow in popularity. This time around, the market extends beyond a one-day show, kicking off on Friday night, May 31, with a preview party. Tickets are limited, and about 40 remain, so please jet over to the Porter Flea tickets page to pick yours up. (It's 21 and up that night, with the show featuring local beers, artisan cheeses, and baked goods from the incredible Sweet Betweens.)

Also new this year, each returning artist will be featuring an AirCraft exclusive item. The theme plays up the unique venue, Cornelia Fort Airpark, a small landing strip in East Nashville with a colorful history, but which was closed to air traffic by the May 2010 Nashville flood. Still, the spirit of flight will live on with this event, and I've been busy screenprinting and binding a series of books that feature a vintage Beechcraft airplane.

Please check out the Porter Flea vendor page to learn more about the 80 great artists who will be in attendance. You can also set yourself a reminder, show your support, and invite friends at the event page on Facebook.

And if you're still wanting more, please look back at my postings and photo albums from the previous Porter Flea shows. You can follow these links:

:: Facebook photo album

:: Summer 2011 show

:: Holiday 2011 show

:: Holiday 2012 show

Up, up, and away!

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Handmade & Bound

The first annual Handmade & Bound book arts festival is just a few days away!  I've been looking forward to this event for months.  It was one of the first things about Nashville I found out about once we knew we'd be moving to town, and I sent in my vendor application before we'd even started packing to leave Virginia. 

I thrilled to be living in a city with a book arts community, and I can't wait to be a part of this event.  In addition to the various vendors selling handmade books and zines, there will be workshops and demos in bookmaking, papermaking, and printmaking, as well as a film screening, a gallery exhibit, live music and food trucks.  

Handmade & Bound Nashville

September 30 and October 1

Watkins College of Art, Design & Film

Friday, September 30

6:30 pm: Opening reception of "Encoded Structures: Interpreting the Story," a juried gallery show of artists' books and zines

8:00 pm: Free Screening of “$100 and a T-shirt," an award-winning documentary on the culture of zine making

Saturday, October 1

Vendors:

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Vendor booths exhibiting and selling artists’ books, zines, small press publications, and other handmade bookish things.

Demonstrations:

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Goldsmith Press Demonstration; print your own DIY bag

10:00 am – 11:00 am and 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Brown Dog Bindery Demonstration; Jennifer Knowles-McQuistion will demonstrate how wooden books are carved, burned, and bound

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Gilded Leaf Bindery Demonstration; book restoration, fine bindings, blank journals, and gold tooling

10:00 am – 5:00 pm: Pamphlet Stitch Books for Kids with local printmaker and book artist Lesley Patterson-Marx

Workshops:

10:00 am to 11:00 am: Pixels, Print and Presence: How to Make the Most of Digital When It Comes to Print

This workshop is an introduction to web and digital assets for anyone from a DIY Zinester to Small Press publishers. 

10:00 am – 11:00 am: Findings & Bindings 

Use a discarded book, found papers both old and new, and a simple no-sew binding technique to create a one-of-a-kind handmade journal to house your creative notions.

11:00 am – 12:00pm: Zines with Kids & Teens

11:00 am – 12:00pm: Storytime for Children

Children can make paper finger puppets of the characters to take home.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: Miniature Accordion Popup Books

Artist Jennifer Knowles-McQuistion will lead participants through making a miniature hardback accordion book with pages that pop up, spill out, and burst from the folds. 

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: Toward A Self-Sufficient, Long-Lived Zine

Examine the nuts and bolts of what it takes to keep a serial zine alive and vital. 

1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Felt Sketchbook

Participants will design their book covers using felt and other materials, such as decorative papers, threads, and beads. Then they will assemble their sketchbooks, binding the books using posts and screws.

2:00 pm – 3:00 pm: The Art of Saying Something Worth Saving

Discussion will cover the pressure language undergoes when we seek to present it in a book arts project, and how words respond and rise to that challenge or collapse under the weight of that attention, and how we recognize it. 

3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Quadraflip or infinity card

Turning the pages of this structure changes their orientation and reveals hidden pages before taking you back to the beginning. 

3:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Open Mic Zine Readings

All day: Papermaking 

Book artist and instructor Annie Herlocker will guide you through pulling your own sheet of paper from pre-pulped materials.

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Anniversaries, the traditional way

Earlier this month my husband and I celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary. We exchanged gifts made of cotton. Last year, we exchanged gifts made from paper. 

We've decided that we're going to follow the year-by-year categories of traditional wedding gifts. Since I'm a bookmaker, I was especially excited about year one's paper gifts and that's probably why we started off with the tradition. I think the themes make the gift giving so much fun. The materials give us a place to start with the gift-giving brainstorming, and then we get to come up with a contemporary idea to fit within the traditional boundaries.

Last year, Tony surprised me with a little handbound book made by Ruth Bleakley. The book features hand-drawn jellyfish illustrations, which was especially fitting because jellyfish are some of my favorite creatures and they often appear in my own artwork. (Ruth is a book artist and illustrator living in Cape Cod. To see more of her work, visit her etsy shop or her blog.)

I know I've mentioned before that my husband loves maps. (He couldn't resist getting one of the East Nashville maps at Porter Flea a few weeks ago.) So for his paper gift last year, I got him a silkscreened world map from These Are Things. We also own their map of Europe, so between all of these we have quite the map theme developing in our home decor. 

This year, the theme was cotton. Tony picked out a bird pillow for me, which is now adding a lively splash of color in our new living room. The pillow was made by Janae Easton of Platypusfile, who I met back in May at the Athens Indie Craftstravaganzaa. Each of her bird pillows is made from vibrant fabrics and a vintage button, and each one is named after an opera singer. My bird's name is Josella Ligi. 

I got my husband two cotton t-shirts from Out of Print. I settled on the To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye shirts, because I liked their designs best, they are some of our favorite classic novels, and because we read them together in high school back when we first started dating. The shirts from Out of Print are based on book cover designs, and with each shirt sale they donate a book to a community in need. 

Next year our theme will be leather. I've already got my eye on these lovely handmade leather bags...

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Porter Flea

On Saturday, Tony and I discover yet another thing to love about our new neighborhood.  We stopped by Porter Flea, the first of hopefully many handmade markets in East Nashville.  We've only lived in Nashville for about 10 days, and we're already falling in love with this city and all that it has to offer.  

The Porter Flea art show had a top-notch group of vendors selling all sorts of goods from jewelry to furniture, and everything in between.  Friendly Arctic was printing awesome East Nashville map posters right then and there.  Because of our love of maps and our growing collection of silkscreened map posters, Tony couldn't resist buying the very first completed print.  We're looking forward to getting our new apartment set up so we can get our new poster on display. 

Alongside Andy and Brendan of Friendly Arctic, the show was also organized by Katie (who makes upcycled t-shirt necklaces) and Jessica (whose linocut prints can be seen below, and in her Pine Street Makery etsy shop).  Of course I'm partial to Jessica's book prints, but my husband was loving the El Camino print. 

Some of my other personal favorites at the show were Modern Arks (gorgeous coffee tables and end tables made from crates and other reclaimed wood), Studio Fjord (I really enjoyed chatting with Tracey about her jewelry), and 400 Moons (they sell terrariums filled with all types of succulents).  Succulents are some of my favorite plants because Tony proposed to me in a greenhouse filled with succulents, and we also used them to decorate the tables at our wedding reception -- exactly two years ago today!

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Swapping recycled books

I had such a great experience participating in the last book swap with the Bookbinding Esty Street Team in May, so I was really looking forward to the August swap. While the previous one had no theme, with this one we were challenged to create books using recycled or reclaimed materials. This post on the BEST blog shows a preview of all of the books made for this swap, and everyone seemed to find interesting objects (like maps, empty boxes, and seat belts) to transform into works of art



On Friday I received my new book from a bookbinder and printmaker in South Dakota. Camille Riner made this book from leftover pieces of her relief prints. She used a piece of an old handmade string paper relief print for the cover. The abaca in the cover sheet makes it strong, and the strings from the handmade paper peek out at the bottom. The interior pages of the double pamphlet section book are made from scraps of paper as well as other repurposed prints. I am absolutely thrilled with my newest addition to my collection of handmade books.



The book I created for the book swap is a small Italian long-stitch with a leather cover. The material used for the cover comes from a pair of red suede pants I found in an Athens, Georgia thrift store. (You can see some pictures of the pants in an earlier blog post.) The red leather strap that holds the book shut was part of a zig-zag pattern on the pants. The colored papers used for the guards are from a Neenah paper swatch book of their recycled papers, and the interior papers are recycled as well.



I have made a few other books from these red suede pants over the past few months, and they have all been fairly traditional. But for this book I wanted to use some different color combination and more graphic papers. I'm quite pleased with the contrast of the teal thread against the red book cover, and I like how it coordinates with the papers inside.



I recently ordered a custom stamp from fellow Etsy seller NoteTrunk that features my logo. I've just recently started to experiment with it, and this is the first book I've used it on to "sign" my work. I stamped my logo onto a scrap of paper, signed and dated below it, and then used the sewing machine to stitch the paper onto the last page of the book. I think this worked out really well and fit with the style of the book. What do you think of the stamp, and of the stitched addition to the last page? Should I turn this into my standard style for signing my books, or would it seem out of place in a more traditional book, like a wedding guest book?



I sent my book to BEST member SeaLemon of Phoenix, Arizona. Being a graphic designer and typography nerd myself, I am a huge fan of her Helvetica books. I enjoy her use of bold colors and patterns in her work, and I especially like her shop's logo. You can also check her out on facebook and twitter.

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Flashback Friday: "Cortona Clothesline" concertina

This week's Flashback Friday is a book that involves two different printmaking techniques, applique, embroidery, and, of course, bookbinding. As the title "Cortona Clothesline" suggests, the inspiration for this book came from my summer spent in Cortona, Italy. I began to love the daily sight of hanging laundry on lines strung from Tuscan mountainside homes. When I returned stateside, I channeled the imagery into my artwork.





These photos were taken in the courtyard behind the historic building where I lived in Cortona. After hand-washing our clothes, we would hang them here to blow in the breeze until dry. Can you imagine a more beautiful setting for laundry? When in Italy, even something as mundane as laundry day can create inspiration for years to come.



On both sides of the cotton rag paper that I used for the pages, I layered ink using the monoprint technique to create an expressive blend of rich blues and greens, inspired by the Italian countryside. I then transferred my drawings of women's garments to a woodblock to be carved. The woodblock was coated with a transparent blue ink and printed atop the monoprint background. Next came the hand sewing of yellow embroidery thread to represent the clothesline.



The book is bound in the concertina, or accordion, style. To create the covers, I cut out the shape of a dress from blue fabric and appliqued it onto green fabric. I hand-stitched clothespins and the line on the cover as well. This book is one in an edition of eight books. Each is unique, using different colors of ink and thread.



This copy of "Cortona Clothesline" is currently for sale in my Etsy shop.

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Flashback Friday: Collaborative Clue Book

Ok, I admit it. I've missed a few Fridays lately with this Flashback Friday series. Custom orders, an upcoming craft fair, and restocking my Etsy shop have been keeping me busy lately. And I've been blogging about all sorts of other things, from artists features to haircuts. But the flashbacks are back with a collaborative book from 2008, which seems particularly relevant because I'm currently participating in a collaboration with members of BEST.

As our final project for a relief printmaking course at the University of Georgia, the entire class collaborated to make a series of limited edition, perfect-bound books. The theme was "Clue," and the inspiration could come from the board game, the movie, or just a general feeling of mystery.

The pages I made for the book are shown above. I carved an image of the board game pieces into a sheet of linoleum, and then printed it onto rag paper with black ink. For this particular print, I added green paper to the edges of the pages, as well as to Mr. Green's shirt. But each print was different, using the corresponding colors for Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, Mr. Green, Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, and Mrs. White (from left to right).



The image above was made by my classmate, Patrick Triggs. His page was one of my favorites in the book. Rather than referring directly to the board game, his image is actually a self portrait partially covered by a larger-than-life thumbprint.



Maggie Smith created a series of tarot cards featuring the Clue characters. Instead of serving as a page in the book, they fit into two pockets inside of the book.



The cover, shown above, was made by our instructor Jennifer Manzella.

Participants: Kathryn Byrne, Matthew Cremeens, Bess Gaby, Katie Graham, Alexis Gruczkowski, Sophie Howell, Timothy McLeod, Morgan Roberts, Emily Rossell, Maggie Smith, Danielle Tobin, Colin Tom, Patrick Triggs, and myself

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Prints!

In addition to my handmade books, I just added a few of my prints to my Etsy shop. You can view them on Etsy by clicking here. I would love to hear what you think of them. I have a poll below where you can vote for your favorite (anonymously), but feel free to leave a comment too if you have anything else you'd like to share about them.

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