Love Little

Archive for the ‘Arty Stuff’ Category

Smock is based in Syracuse, New York, where their print shop has 20 antique presses, 50 tons of equipment, and 17 employees. Smockpaper describe themselves as, “faithful lovers of historic craft. We have letterpress ink in our veins. We are idealists. This means we believe in things. We are trying to make the world better right now. This affects everything we do. We read Walt Whitman (he was a letterpress printer too, by the way). We fall head over heels for heavy cast iron presses. We believe in the creation of beautiful things. And we want, like you, to feel good about where our beautiful things come from”

You can see the beautiful letter-pressed stationary, invitations and gift wrap on http://smockpaper.com/.

“That was me aged about 8, after swimming on a Saturday morning at Ladywell swimming baths somewhere south of London. I’ve got my towel tucked under my arm and my dad and I are on our way to Foyles bookshop which was our Saturday morning treat. My dad told me it was the biggest bookshop in the world and I loved it, the fresh piles of new books and being allowed to choose one.

Dad bought me Rudyard Kipling when I wanted Enid Blyton and I still have the books he bought me. This is where my love of books and all things bibliophile began. Escapism among the towering stacks of freshly laid print.”

I love this description of Louise’s love of books.

Louloulovesbooks was introduced to me at my book club at HBP, I have seen a few of her books and each one gives me that “I want to own this” feeling. They are visual treats with a brilliant sense of humour. Check out her website here, I am trying so hard not to buy to many books.

I thought I would begin the first post about book artists with my teacher, Lucy May Schofield.

Last week I started a course at Hot Bed Press called the Complete Bookmaker, its a 10 week course where we will explore narrative and sequence, form and content, text and image to create our own artists books. So far it has been a fabulous course and I feel incredibly inspired, if not a little scared at times because my use of the English language can sometimes be quite limited.

Lucy is an artist and book maker whose desire to make, coupled with a passion for the written work has made her a successful artist and a great teacher of book arts. Having published over twenty limited editions in the past seven years, Lucy’s work is held in many public and private collections in the UK and abroad including TATE Britain, Chelsea College of Art, London College of Communication, Winchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work has a real nostalgic feel and the simplicity of the structures coupled with the beautiful imagery and words make them precious items that are accessible for us to own.  You can check out Lucy’s work on her website and also her flickr account.

A few weeks ago I completed a hard backed book course at Hot Bed Press. Its the first book binding course that I have done and I loved it. I had previously done a Portfolio box making course at Hot bed press and I throughly enjoyed that as well. Both courses are taught by the talented Lucy May Schofield who is brilliant teacher. Its lovely to spend the weekend with a group of ladies learning a new skill (and eating biscuits) and I will most definintley be doing more book binding courses at Hot Bed Press when they next come up.

So here are pictures of what I created. This is my hard backed book, its GORGEOUS. Metallic purple buckram with a stunning iridescent hand made paper from Liberty end papers.

I have since made some pamphlet notebooks with my prints which I am now selling through my Etsy and Folksy shop. Each has a bright contrasting belly band and end papers.

We have a new book at home by the illustrator Kustaa Saksi.

Kustaa has worked with many great clients such as Nike, Mandarina Duck , The Times and Levi’s, to name a few. My fiance claims its the most beautiful book that we have, big words but the book does live up to it. Printed on uncoated paper with the illustrations mixed in with photographs and repeat patterns, its pure escapism.