I watched the birds instead of the dreadful state of affairs in this country’s celebration of its slow sink into autocracy. There was a pair of these birds staring at each other with their mouths open by the pond out back. They were not the usual song sparrows who hang out but maybe juveniles of some kind. I like their spotty feathers. Almost like starlings. Maybe my daughter, the birder will know.
It is unbearably hot this week and I stayed inside most days. I tried to remember how I showed Australians this single needle Coptic using book cover pages as folios to hide the start and finishing. I found one by Barb Adams that she gave me after the lesson about ten years ago. And because the ends are buried inside the spine sections of the cover, I had a devil of a time figuring it out. Hers is the very neat one on the bottom. My first try is on the top.
It is like when you do something over and over and then depend on body memory to take over years later. It could be age issues, but I mostly forgot the secret of making this book so mysteriously tidy. I will try again another day. Anyway, I used what papers I had handy. Some lovely contact prints I did in Australia along with plain sketching paper for the inside folios and Rives BFK that I printed years ago to layer the cover. One piece of board is inserted between the oversized cover folios to make it sturdier. I used leftover Rives BFK as a substitute. When the book is all stitched, the cover pages are pasted over the filler cover, left to dry and then trimmed. I called it a Gideon Bible cover because it reminded me of those little plastic bibles handed out in schools many years ago. The ones with the extended covers…usually green and left behind in the library….at least in my case they were. Notice on Barb’s book the cover folios were trimmed far enough out so as to act as protection for the text block. Mine are trimmed shorter because the paper was too heavy to shape over.
I do need to make another one if only to tidy up my stitches. It does take a very long thread to make this book without having to tie on a new end.
The next story book page is starting to be drawn into. Not a clear direction yet. Diana from poetry helped me clean up the poem for the first one. If it weren’t so damnably hot, I’d have more energy for getting into thinking and doing. Now I just think a nap is effort enough. Back to those 8,000 steps tomorrow so I should fix myself a drink and then take a nap. Maybe a Turbo Tonic would be nice.
The cats have already started on their fourth nap of the day.
Til later….