Lotus fold books

I was asked to teach this lovely book structure a month or so ago, and I'm glad I was. I've taught it to a couple of groups already now, but I haven't actually made many of them myself yet, so I thought I ought to get on and have a play.

 I call them lotus fold books because they are made up of a series of pieces of paper folded into a simple origami type shape that looks a little like a lotus flower. Depending on how you stick them together you can get a variety of different books.

 I was experimenting with different colours and combinations and came up with some weird and wonderful shapes. They almost need a video to fully appreciate them, they are very beautiful when they open up.

I haven't put anything in any of them yet, but I think they would be lovely with little quotes or inspiring images.
I also picked up a pile of miscellaneous paper doilys from a charity shop because I can't resist anything vaguely stationary-like, and I've folded up a couple to make into another one of these books. Should look pretty amazing!
My next book project is to sew some more coptic books as I'd like to teach these too, and I haven't made any for ages. Here's a close up of a coptic stitched book. Pretty isn't it?

Dolphin sightings

We finally had our first sail of the season. We had to get our boat from Plymouth down to Falmouth to have some work done on her. The weather has been a bit on the chilly side for sailing, but on Friday 5th the wind was in the right direction, we had the offer of help from a friend, and the forecast wasn't toooo cold! We wrapped up warm and had a fabulous sail (and I wasn't too seasick). The best bit was we had four dolphins follow us for about a quarter of an hour. I got a couple of photos and Vince got a video of them. We reported the sighting to Sea Watch and they put our sighting on their sightings page, which made me feel slightly important!

http://seawatchfoundation.org.uk/?page_id=131

and from our pictures and description they were identified as common dolphins.

Below is a link to the video. My camera's pretty basic so don't expect wonderful quality, but you definitely get to see dolphins!....

A still from the video!

um, not sure how to embed a video, try this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI3lCOlQh0

I'm getting really into my book workshop stuff at the moment, so more news on that coming up. 

I'm thinking of starting a separate blog for books, is that a good idea? Hmm, I'll think about that a bit more...

Craft fair

Craft fairs

Aaargh I hate them!

Lots of bloggers seem to blog about wonderful craft fairs they've been to, get all excited about the planning, share pictures of their beautiful stalls, blah blah. Me, I dislike, them ....... a lot. For one thing I don't like trying to sell things because I don't like people trying to sell me things. I never sell enough to cover my time at the fair all day let alone all the preparation time and the time spent making my books. But every now and then I forget how much I dislike them and I get seduced into doing it again, and I do have to say that occasionally I make a useful contact that leads to a dose of teaching work. At the moment I have a load more book workshops in the pipeline and I decided to have a stall at a craft fair in Exeter mainly to promote my workshops. Because I now expect to hate the whole experience I don't suffer too much on the day. On this occasion I sold a few book making materials (under £10 worth), but didn't sell a single book. I did get rid of seven fliers for workshops which was ok but not brilliant. The only sight consolation was that I spoke to several other stallholders who hadn't sold anything either so it wasn't just me! 

I did make an effort to make my stall look nice, I practised this kind of bookshelf look at home..

I made a banner with book pages.. Note the bit that's supposed to say 'handmade' on the table, it actually reads edamdnaH, because I strung them the wrong way round at first. Surprisingly I found this very amusing and it cheered me up so much I had to take a picture!

Anyway, the event was in a theatre space, which as you can see below was very black, although quite well lit, but my stall was in a slightly dark corner. Looking at the pictures when I got home I thought my stall looked like a horrible untidy jumble. This is actually quite a good reflection of how I live, and, although I'm comfortable like that, I don't think it's a good way to present my books, ho hum, back to the drawing board..

In fact I'm really quite embarrassed at how bad it looks, but I'm going to share it anyway because I have a tendency to blog about all the lovely and wonderful things in my life and I just want to share some of my angst and uncomfortableness.
On the plus side I did meet a couple of people who expressed an interest in me doing workshops in their spaces, and possibly sharing space in a pop-up art shop in Crediton. we shall see...!