Work in progess

Making a few more Black Books for the exhibition at Camberwell college library. This was the scene on Sunday (note the start of a long list! still so much to be done....) and today the show was installed.  It's been keeping me very busy, along with a few demanding things that are happening at college this week.

Only a few weeks ago I had no idea of how to make a clamshell box, and now I've made many, in board and in that corrugated plastic stuff used for real estate agents' signs - that was for the box that needed to be "surprisingly light". The plastic stuff is sort of ok - at least the glue sticks to it - but the corners of the trays need to be strongly glued, carefully weighted, and left to dry.

Even after a lot of practice, wrapping bookcloth round the edges of the tray takes 15 minutes. That practice has also got me into cleaner habits - the last few didn't have stray blobs of glue on the black cloth.

If you do get glue on the cloth, use water to remove it - provided it's water-soluble glue/paste of course - and instead of rubbing just the spot, extend the water over the entire cover, so there isn't a watermark.

One of the covers I was "restoring" this way this morning was a cover with lettering - and to my surprise, wetting the lettering removed the shiny bits where the bone folder was used to define it. Which might be useful in some instances - but meant, in this case, that I had to go round all the lettering with the bone folder again to get the shininess back! Otherwise the letters weren't legible... and the title is important.