Book #211

Hantori chō

Another traditional Japanese account book structure, the hantori chō, often used for receipt books but apparently also used for sketchbooks. This one has my own hand-carved rubber stamps on the cover; they are characters that I copied from the cover of an old Japanese account book.

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day! I'll be spending the day in Dartmouth, NS at the Alderney Landing Boardwalk Artist Festival and I'll be selling my books there. Come for a visit if you're in the area; there is always lots of fun things happening there on Canada Day.

Red and White notebooks featuring a little
Maple Leaf stamp that I made recently.

Barn Owl Notebooks

I like carving linoleum and rubber stamps even though I don't seem to have much time for it. Last week, though, I found time to make this Barn Owl stamp to use on notebook covers.


I also did some Snowy Owl sketches and may try him next. But for now, if you're in the Halifax area, these small Barn Owl notebooks are now available at Inkwell Boutique.

A Japanese Account Book

The very first bookbinding book that I got, was the "Japanese Bookbinding" book by Ikegami. I was entirely impressed with all the history included in this book and I read every word and made every project. One of my favorite notebook structures from this book is this simple account book structure. This structure is called daifuku chō and it was used during the Edo period (1603-1868) for travel diaries, guest registers, and primarily as merchant account books (Ikegami p.68). Ikegami includes a photograph of an account book from the mid-1800s and that always catches my attention when I go through his book.

So a while back, I decided that I would try to replicate the "look" of that mid-1800s current-accounts book. The first thing I had to do, was figure out how to recreate the Japanese calligraphy. Since I'm not a calligrapher, and know nothing of Japanese writing at all, I had to figure out something that I could manage. So I carved some rubber stamps to recreate the Japanese characters on the cover.

I really don't know what they mean. Ikegami's text suggests that they would embellish the cover with the characters for "great fortune" but I don't know if this example follows that trend. I did speak to someone who knew a bit more than I, and she believed that the character on the bottom was the character for "account book." If any of my readers can enlighten me about the others, I'd love to hear from you!

Once I had my Japanese character stamps ready, I stamped them onto some cream handmade paper and added some little hand-drawn characters as well. The cover paper and the pages were then aged, and then I bound the books together using linen twine.

There is a long braided piece extending from the spine at the top of the book. Ikegami writes that completed ledgers might have been strung together and tied to a long cord so that in case of an emergency, such as a fire, the merchant could easily grab all his account books at once and toss them to safety.

Summer Journals

It seems that Summer has finally arrived here - we had a very slow start and even yet, I'm not convinced that the Spring weather has truly vanished. In anticipation of the season, I have been making some fun summer journals...which just means they are a bit more colourful than others! Halifax recently had Bike Week to kick off the bike season. So I carved a bicycle rubber stamp and made some notebooks. We were there watching these guy race and my kid zoomed around on his tricycle. I had the bicycle stamp with me and gave the kids bike tattoos too. I've done a bunch of leather and suede journals too, lots of summer here. Including two of my "margarita journals" in Blue Curacao and Green Iguana! The leather and suede books all have a rainbow of pages inside, using seven different colours of paper. This one is a lemon-lime suede mini book: Here's to some real Summer days!

Time for China

There is a new exhibit opening today at Abecedarian Gallery in Denver, Colorado. The exhibit is entitled "Modest in Scale" and features bookworks five inches or less and modestly scaled prints, drawings and paintings. I have three works in this exhibit, including this little book. "Time for China" is a very small book that is shaped like a teabag and also the same size. It is a limited edition booklet that I printed using a set of rubber stamps that I carved depicting all the elements of a perfect little tea party. Abecedarian Gallery is operated by Alicia Baily, an artist whom I met at PBI a few months ago. Besides creating rather fabulous artists books herself, Alicia also spearheads some other very interesting projects through a group called Spondere.

I've been printing lino again

Recently I spent an evening making prints of some of my favorite lino cuts and rubber stamps that I've made. Some of the prints are being used for notebooks like these. Black and white chopstick notebooks with grey flowers... My picnic table and wooden swing lino prints. The peach and green covers are some of the paper I made a couple months ago. Images are printed in brown ink. These notebooks are bound with a simple 2-section sewing. And some simple pink and white notebooks with flowers printed in gold-coloured ink.

Printmaking, the beginning

The last half of my PBI session was about printmaking. The instructor was Matt Liddle and he spent a lot of time the first couple days demonstrating a million different techniques and showing us samples and all that good stuff. Here he is, showing us one of his pieces, which is a reduction wood cut. He has the final wood block there as well as one of the finished prints.


I had never done anything like this before and was a bit concerned about that lack of experience as I think all the other people in the class had at least a bit of exposure to it. But of course, there was nothing to be concerned about! We started by making some rubber stamps - Matt does some amazing things with his rubber stamps, creating extensive and detailed landscapes and graphic stories, often in book format. My stamps were really simple, but it was a great way to get quick results on my first day of printmaking class!


And apparently printers used to make themselves hats from a sheet of newspaper...so we made ourselves some printer's hats and stamped them using our new rubber stamps. Mine is on the left, the right shows a few of the other paper hat designs and stamps made by others in the class.


And, AshvilleBookGirl was in my printmaking class too! It was great to meet you Clara, and so glad we had a class together!