Friday Night Flicks: Alison Stockmarr

Tonight’s flick features Alison Stockmarr, whose collage works cross over into ‘altered book’ territory.

 

 

If you have a few free minutes this weekend, you could have a look at Stockmarr’s website or watch a longer version of the video here.

Memory

I have been working on another piece about childhood memories. (You can find a DIY version of Fragile, a previous memory-based work, here.) I am using a folded structure that I created four years ago. This model has been floating around on my desk ever since, waiting for the right project.

Friday Night Flicks: Dante Jericho

In tonight’s flick, collage artist Dante Jericho talks about how she came to make collages and how she approaches the process.

Collage is her main love, in which she is both artist and instructor/facilitator in the practice of Contemplative Collage, a process in which students create collages which they then “read” in much the same way as one would read a dream. She has taught Contemplative Collage in the South and Southwest, including at the Huntsville Art League, Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, ABQ Open Space, as teaching online to an international community. She also maintains a weekly Contemplative Collage forum in which she demonstrates the power of collage as a creative tool in everyday life.

 

 

You might wish to try making a contemplative collage this weekend.

A Last-Minute Valentine Bookmark

Pinterest has been offering me bookmarks lately. I couldn’t resist adapting the two-part butterfly for a Valentine bookmark.

Friday Night Flicks: Kathryn Holt

Tonight’s flick is really a slide show introducing Kathryn Holt and her collage process.

 

 

Perhaps you will make some paste papers this weekend for use in collages. If you haven’t made paste papers before, here’s a video from Jeff Rathermel. It’s almost an hour, but it covers a lot. (Jeff doesn’t mention starch paste, which can also be used. If you want to learn to make that, read this post.)

Endings and Beginnings

This week saw the completion of my response to the January #areyoubookenough challenge prompt: Expectations.

Friday Night Flicks: Collage Artist | Ekua Holmes

It’s #februllage on Instagram and I am playing along for the month, so I thought I would feature collage artists here this month. Today’s video introduces Ekua Holmes during her artist’s residency at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

 

 

You might want to try a bit of collage yourself this weekend. Grab an old magazine, a pair of scissors, and a pot of glue and have fun!

Heart-In-Hand

My maternal grandfather was Pennsylvania Dutch, so it is possible that he made a papercut valentine or, perhaps, a heart-in-hand love token for my grandmother.

Friday Night Flicks: Mohawk Paper, The Making of Mohawk Superfine

I first posted this for a Friday Night Flick back in 2014, almost a decade ago. There was some discussion on the Book_Arts-L recently about the term “superfine”, so it seemed an appropriate time to revisit the video.

 

 

To save you some time doing research this weekend, the term “superfine” does not refer to the surface (you can have ‘Smooth’ or ‘Eggshell’) or the weight (the paper comes in a full range from Writing and Text weights to 160dtc/433 gsm Cover), but to something else entirely. Here’s the explanation Jeff Peachey posted in January of 2018.

The Origin of Mohawk Superfine

Quite likely, every bookbinder and book conservator located in North America has used Mohawk Superfine paper.  It’s a wonderful paper for many applications: textblocks for models, endpapers for circulating collections, lining boards and spines, labels, and so on.

Surprisingly, at least to me, the name does not come from 1970s urban slang, or the 1960s Garage Rock band The Superfine Dandelion, but was coined in 1946.

Mohawk originally developed Superfine as the result of a challenge from Yale University Press to produce an attractive, archival text paper for their reprint of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. A Mohawk representative showed a sample of the new paper to a customer in Boston, who reportedly said, “this is a superfine sheet of paper.”

That final quotation originally linked to a page on the Mohawk Paper website celebrating the 70th anniversary of the paper.

(Once again, my apologies for being late with this!)

Cut Paper Valentines

I learned something this week: when designing a papercut I think like someone who works with a knife, not like someone who works with scissors.