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Previous post: Pages 1-6, complete
Next post: …and, the pop-up

December 7, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Covers

As you can see, I had a lot of fun with the front cover:

Front cover of book (handwoven fabric in background)
Front cover of book (handwoven fabric in background)

(The head of the figure is gilded with 24K gold leaf, a leftover from my egg art days.)

The back cover is similar, only simpler:

Back cover of book. Like the front cover, only less fancy.
Back cover of book. Like the front cover, only less fancy.

I’m kind of tempted to put curtains on the back of the book and show the tangram figure taking a bow, but that’s definitely a finishing touch – I’ll leave that to the last, just in case I run out of time.

Something struck me as I was finishing the front cover – this book draws on an incredibly broad range of techniques from the fiber arts.  There is the custom-designed, handwoven fabric background.  It is painted using silk-painting techniques for pages 3-4, and scrunch-dyed using tie-dye/low-water immersion techniques for the covers.  The fabric covering the pages (and most of the tangram figures) is heat-bonded, a mixed-media fiber arts technique.  The covers are pieced using the freezer-paper technique from quilting, and the stage “curtain” on the front cover is hemmed using a catchstitch, a couture sewing method.  All I need to do is add knitting and handspinning to the last page and I think I’ll have my entire history in fiber arts covered!

Anyway, that makes it more special to me.  This is not something I could have made when I was twenty, and it’s nice to know that my entire repertoire of skills contributed to this.  Kinda cool, really.

Still left to do: attach the covers to the book, decorate the back pages of the book (optional), and finish the pop-up pages.  Deadline is Thursday morning, but I think I’ll likely finish tomorrow.

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: design class

Previous post: Pages 1-6, complete
Next post: …and, the pop-up

Comments

  1. Laura says

    December 14, 2010 at 9:32 am

    It’s always interesting – in retrospect – how every path we take has been the right one to get us where we are right now. 🙂

    Cheers!
    Laura

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