Book du jour - unfinished

The most recent book follows on from the workshop with Ellen Bell on Saturday - and isn't quite finished - I want to record my thoughts on why....

Ellen works by cutting words from carefully selected old books, and compiles them into images, often from family photographs. See her work here. We were to bring "a book" to the workshop. I brought an A-Z - nothing precious - to cut up, thinking to combine the maps with the printed envelope interiors.

Ellen worked with each of us individually, helping to tease out what we intended to do and (importantly) why. It became clear to me as the bookmaking progressed that I wasn't clear on the why of this combination - so, how could the reader be sure of what they were looking at, and why would they bother continue looking?

The envelopes quickly fitted together into "a book" - with interleaving possibilities, and even pockets with windows. At first the windows were intriguing - but in the end I found them distracting. Also, I switched from using road maps - which had nothing to do with "my lines" and the names of tube stations - putting bits of the tube map under the windows instead. Nor did I follow up on the suggestion to have a tangle or roads (or tube lines) spilling out of the pockets. (Something for next time?)

Instead of using the roads in the A-Z as planned, I ended up using the list of areas of London, cutting them into alphabetical blocks to cover up the names of the tube stations. Now that I'm using tube maps instead of road maps, it would be good to intersperse names of tube stations. There is scope for this - I just need to do it -

Elements of the cover come from both road book and tube map - too confusing -

At first the book structure was "messy", with raw edges of envelopes and even torn bits (though I tried to be careful when opening up the envelopes) - so, tucking those in and gluing them down was an improvement, though it did away with the "blank" pages between the printed ones.

The contents aren't right - not what you'd expect from the cover.

It's all very confusing. I might come back to this later, but for now, it's been a valuable lesson. I didn't start from the right place - the envelope isn't the right vehicle here.