The Interconnection of Time and Tide 2

Last Sunday, I posted about the book I was working on: The Interconnection of Time and Tide. As promised, this week you get to see the rest of the process and the final product.

Here’s some of the finished stitching on the main accordion (the lines of stitching stop at the slit on the inner fold of the accordion)

and here’s what it looks like from the wrong side.

You can see the join between the two calendar sections that I used for the base accordion. I joined them at the top and bottom with strips of Japanese paper. The folds in which I cut the slits were also reinforced. This makes the piece stronger and also makes the spine of the book visually consistent.

Next I inserted the tide chart accordion through the slits in the lunar calendar accordion. This was trickier than it would be if mounting individual signatures, particularly because of the cutouts on the page. Here’s a view of the spine.

Folded strips of the blue Japanese paper were inserted through the tide chart accordion, locking the whole structure together.

The last image shows our new cat helping. You can tell her arrival was rather sudden, as the camera had already done an autofocus on the book before she appeared in the frame.

I glued down the tab ends of the tide chart (you can see them in the spine photo above), then glued the outer pages of the moon accordion down over them to form the front and back covers. All that was left was to do the title panel. I printed the title in reverse on the back of a piece of the same paper I used for the tide chart and used that for a stitching guide.

The panel was trimmed to the same size as the interior accordion and mounted in the same position relative to the larger page.

A number of decisions had to made in designing the book. I chose the structure because it gives an in and out/low and high rhythm to the work. The lunar calendars were printed in silver ink, so both the blue and white Japanese papers were chosen not only for strength, but because they both have reflective inclusions that recall the shininess of the moons. The embroidery floss is also shiny. Its use for the title links the outside of the book to the inside, as does the use of the blue paper for both the spine reinforcements and the locking inserts.

Although this post wasn’t written as a set of instructions, there is probably enough information in the images to help you figure out how to do this structure yourself. As a final look at how it all went together, here’s a shot from above. Without the cat.