Book #200

Flag Book

Welcome to the 200th day of the year! And may I present, my 200th binding of the year, the flag book. And a rainbow for Halifax Pride which is being celebrated this week.

This flag book features 200 flags, each cut from my own marbled papers so this book also represents 200 different sheets of marbled paper. It was an interesting process for me to get all these scraps of paper cut and arranged. There are sometimes stories or memories associated with them as I experimented with different papers and palettes, when I switched from watercolour to acrylic paint, or practiced certain patterns over and over, or made special papers for certain projects, etc. Arranging them by colour was harder than I expected but it did reveal a few things about my colour choices... I seem to do a lot of blues and greens and I had to really scrounge to find just a few bits of orange.

The first 4 flag books

These are the first 4 flag books that I made. This effort was prompted by the B.E.S.T Book Swap. Our last swap was all about flag books so I had to make one. But I had never made one before. The very first one: it uses found images for the flags and the accordion, and the cover has some of my paste paper on there. There is a quote about blue skies printed on the back of the flags. The second one: it also uses found images for the flags. There are a few lines from the Frost poem "Birches" printed on the backs of these flags. The book cloth on the cover was hand-painted then backed with paper to make book cloth. I did not do the painting, though, it was a friend with whom I swapped some book cloth several years ago (thank you Leah, if you ever happen by here and see this!). The third one: this was made in preparation of the fourth since I had an idea for the fourth, but wanted to try it first. I used more found images for the flags (somehow I manage to collect a lot of images in triplicate or quadruplicate or quintuplicate and this turns out to be handy when playing with the flag book structure). So I wanted the silly bobkitten (or whatever sort of beast that is) to pop through a frame. After successfully getting that bobkitten to pop through his frame, I was ready to do it again with real flags. So, this very literal flag book is made with Canada flags, obviously. And it worked, the maple leaf pops through nicely. Some of my own marbled paper is on the cover. This is the book that I submitted to the B.E.S.T Book Swap and you can check out all the flag books on the team's blog if you are interested.