About a dozen years ago, I took some courses through CBBAG: Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild. In the last few years, I'd done very little binding and didn't realize how much I'd missed it.
To get back into it, I decided to make some smaller journals. Just to refresh my skills and to become reacquainted with my tools and supplies.
For the past few years, rather than make books, I've been making collages. They include antique photographs and letter fragments, flowers that I pick and press, shells and pebbles I collect, hand painted papers, skeleton keys, porcelain doll parts. When the collage is at a certain stage, I write a line or more of text, print it out, stain it integrate it into the collage.
When I made the first journal then, it was no surprise when I found myself including a collage on its cover. I use this one now for jotting down ideas and images which will eventually become the lines that I use on my collages.
I have some gorgeous leather scraps which I've been carting around with me for years, and finally decided to use one of my favourites for a full leather binding. Which meant bringing out my leather-paring knife. I also wanted some variety, so decided to stain the pages.
The collage on the cover of this one includes a porcelain doll's arm, fragment of an antique letter, and a couple of matt glass beads.
As I went on, I had some paper cut offs. As I've traditionally done with these, I made a smaller journal. I decided to use another arm from an antique porcelain doll as well as a fragment of an antique letter, and hand painted papers to decorate this one.
There were paper scraps left over from this one too. So...wash, rinse, repeat...
The journals got smaller and smaller, until I finally reached the limit of what my eyes and fingers were capable of in this ca. 2 x 2 cm journal.
By this time, I started to think about my collages again and wondered how I could incorporate these mini journals into them. While Molly looked on.
This is how it turned out. Full circle.
Her text is:
'She collected things; some forgotten, discarded, stolen:
fragments of a love letter, dead flowers from a locket, a child's first dreams,
and sang them into her book of shadows, to become songs for her own subtle magic.'