PBI classes that I didn't take

Unfortunately, at PBI, I could not take all the classes. There were ten classes being offered, but each person can only do three of them! At the end of each session, though, there is a show-and-tell where we share our work with each other so I was able to see what everyone else had been doing.

There was a session on making pop-up books, with Shawn Sheehy. Sadly, I didn't get any photos of the books they made in the class - and they were very impressive! You can get an idea of how cool the books must be if you check out Shawn's own work at his website: www.shawnsheehy.com.

There was also a writing class, with Audrey Niffenegger (author of The Time Traveller's Wife). This class did some fabulous readings for us at the show-and-tell. Audrey also did a reading from her new novel which will be available later this year. Based on the bit she read, I'm hooked, I need to know what's going on with those people.

Audrey Niffenegger
James Reid-Cunningham's class made pierced vellum bindings which is a stiff board binding that originated in the 16th century. I had never seen this kind of vellum binding before - and these ones were quite spectacular.


There was a papermaking and pulp painting class, with Beck Whitehead. It was really intriguing to see the results from the class.


The most colourful table at the show-and-tell was certainly the origami class. Jerry Marciniak had his class folding and folding and folding...it was contagious actually and even those of us who weren't in the class found ourselves folding origami boxes and flowers from time to time.


Paul Denhoed did an intensive Japanese papermaking class. These folks were working hard - they started from scratch, cleaning and cooking the kozo plants, pounding it with mallets, etc etc to produce a variety of beautiful mulberry papers.


There was also a box making class. Specifically, Barbara Mauriello's class made these puzzle boxes. It is a set of 12 blocks inside a larger box and the smaller blocks have parts of images on them like those kid's puzzles where each side of the block makes a different picture.