At The Bottom Of The Sea

My studio still is under construction, and unfortunately will stay in this state for at least another week, since the delivery of my new workbench and cabinet will take that long. – I am already looking forward to show you pictures of the finished place. Until then I have about 30 square cm space to work on. So I’ll focus on content for the next days, as I have during the last week. I hope I can present some more lino cuts and the like, soon.

But today I want to show off the last book that I finished. It’s called “At The Bottom Of The Sea”. I made it in July, before going on vaacation. And it was the work on this piece that restarted my underwater interest, some of the results were already visible on this blog. This book was made for the BEST flag book swap.

A flag book mainly is a concertina fold between
hard covers where there are pieces of cardstock attached to the concertina. When it is opened and stetched, the different pieces move in a direction that depends on the side of the mountain to which the piece of cardstock was attached.

The simplest construction uses square pieces. In a top row all of them are attached to the left sides of the mountain folds, and in a bottom row all get attached to the right sides. When you open this simple book, the pieces move past each other, open with a satisfying flapping sound, and overall the little pieces of cardstock look a bit like flags waving in the wind.

As far as I know, it is Hedi Kyle who had the initial idea for this structure. Well, it has been around a while and different people have modiefied this structure in different directions. Rhonda has gathered some links to tutorials and examples.

My book here has circular flaps with the smaller circles moving through the bigger ones. Well, they are not exactly circles, but parts of ellipses, and it was quite some work to find out the right excentricity so that it still looks circular but the arcs can move through each other properly.

In the middle is one solid flag with “me” inside like I drew me in “becoming buechertiger”. The text on the concertina reads: “Once I dreamed I was living at the bottom of the sea, and fish like birds flying all around me.”

Because I wanted the text there, I decided to push the flags through slids in the concertina and attach them at the backside.

Check out what Rhonda wrote about it – there you’ll also find more pictures and a photo of the backside, where you can see the little tabs.