Thursday, December 2, 2010

Mirror, mirror..on the book?



Artist book. Seven sins. Aka: the longest/tedious project ever for an elective class. This book consists of the seven sins as road signs and a photo/graphic to represent that sin. The covers are mirror to signify a look into yourself as to what sin you see. The original assignment was to create 5 editions of the same book. So essentially I had 5 times more work than an average project. Lets take a look at the steps it took me to accomplish this book, shall we?
1. A trip to Home Depot to get mirror cut, whom couldn't cut mirror so they sent me to Lowe's who broke 3 pieces of mirror and left me with 5 rough edged pieces to sand down myself.
2. Midor-ing the white wood trim to frame the mirror (which meant I had to bring home 96 inches of this wood to use my parents saw over Thanksgiving break)
3. Printing the images created for the content of this book. (the worst mistake made: printing the 35 pages on $73 worth of 11"x17" cardstock instead of 8.5"x11". Ouch.)
4. Assembling the mirror and wood frame onto the book board. Obviously this was difficult considering my first time cutting and sanding wood on this small of a scale. The measurements were not exact so it took a bit of finagling. Its also a lot more difficult than you might think to sand mirror to make a nicer edge than what the Lowe's guy left me with.
4. Drilling holes in the covers and pages. Actually a pretty easy task, but time consuming when you consider the 35 pages had be individually poked.
5. Finally I got to bind the books using a coptic stitch. The most monotonous task and the most rewarding considering you actually see the final piece. 

Now mix this with the flu and the stress of about 7 other projects, and you'll understand the miserable disaster I have been lately. Things are slowly starting to come around with most of my classes so I'm getting out of this rut. To be honest, I think my crafting skills were lacking toward the end of this project but I was so anxious to finish that I wasn't caring much. And due to the impressive effects that this flu/cold has had on me, I haven't made it to this class to even turn it in yet. Oh the joys of college!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

what class was this for? its very nice sarah...now you can do anything in the real world! haha

Sarah said...

Thanks Leanne. It was for my artist book elective. Apparently there's a lot of printmaking included in the class but I took it for the crafting of the actual books.