My Coptic swap

There's been an enormous gap in my blog posts but I hope from today I'm back on track. Over the past few months I've gone back to work cataloguing rare books, I've spent a month in New Zealand and - well, that's enough for excuses. My last post was about the book sent to me by Astrid in the Book Arts Forum swap so I thought I'd show you the book I made and sent to Jackie at tjbookarts. The theme of the swap was My Town so I decided to produce a coptic bound book of my own photos of Sydney and Coogee - my city and my town. Each photograph had a description on the facing page and there were two or three pages of information about Sydney and Coogee.

I used my own paste paper for covering with the title inset into the front board, and did an eight needle coptic stitch using waxed linen thread. I love the challenge of using multiple needles but eight is probably enough. I've used twelve in the past and decided I didn't really need to put myself through that more than once. I had (foolishly, as I soon realised) printed the photographs on single sheets so had to do a complicated matching and pasting to join each two pages to make a single section.

I intend to make this book again but will give a lot more thought to the way I print it and will have sections with more pages, which will give the book extra strength. Not that I didn't give it a lot of thought to start with but I seem to need to learn from experience and I certainly learned a lot from this one. I hope Jackie liked it. I found it quite daunting sending my book out into the world in a swap - quite different from selling or giving a book as a gift or donation. Daunting but very enjoyable and I certainly hope to take part in more swaps.