Covers

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

(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:

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.