Book project update

At time of writing (mid-day Thursday, I'm waiting for some glue to dry) the time available for finishing the books can be measured in hours - a maximum of about 12 hours, if Friday is a long day. I've been taking photos along the way, and keeping lists, as well as a collection of post-its at "mission control central" -

Tuesday evening

Thursday mid-morning

I got enthusiastic about the idea of gluing painted papers onto maps and making them into fan books, like the paint colour collections you get sometimes, or samples of formica strung together on a chain, and assembled some possible "collections" -

Then reality set in and the grey and red were put away for another time. "Somewhere under the Rainbow" has now been made (6 copies), and "Green and Pleasant Land" awaits -

The next item started as the over-run from painting the pages, the bits that were caught at the bottom of the pages.

These were joined and scanned and snipped into A4-sized chunks - expanded to the width of the paper -

The first version printed out fine, but looked dull on the matte photo paper; never mind, it will make a scroll -

The second version, destined to be a concertina book, is printed on satin paper, too heavy to roll up and not easy to crease either - and at page 13 of 15 the printer packed up. That was Sunday and with any luck the second set of spares for the ink system will arrive today and my Domestic Printer Engineer (and all-round support person) won't have the same frustration as with the first set. (btw, kudos to Marrutt who have been so helpful with this and in the past - the DPE says they are a delight to deal with.)

It waits, and the spine of the dictionary has now been repaired, or rather, altered to become a sort of book in itself - it contains a list of pigment names, taken from the index of Philip Ball's history of colours, Bright Earth.

That jar in the photo contains my wheat paste - quite easy to make, following Keith A. Smith's recipe, which you can find here.

Which takes us to the main event - the paint chart. Oh my, the number of versions of this I've printed out in the past few days!

Finally the columns on the front match those on the back, and it's been proofread yet again (4 further errors found), and I've had lots of practice making the dummies ... but even so, when printing on the good paper, got the gluing slightly wrong. It would be wonderful to have three copies made, but I have no idea how long the gluing of strips will take.

It finally has a title: "Shades: A Chambers Collaboration".