Dot l Dash. a (culinary) alphabet

Look! I made a book! I wanted to show it off so desperately today, that I showed it to my kids. It was a big hit with them. It looks like I have to edition, as they both demanded their own copy. Well, mainly they wanted to get a good look and a chance to explore it – not just looking while I am holding it.

I don’t know whether I’ll edition. I would love to, but I have another book to finish first (346). Maybe it’ll be a nice way of trying out my new screenprinting machine – once I indeed have it here, I’ll see whether I think something like that could work.

Anyway, this book was quickly made in two days for this year’s “We love your books” with the theme “dot – dash”. I had been wanting to use my Dremel burning iron to make dots and dashes. When on Thursday I just had one day left to finish a book, I was going to use it. Apart from writing in Morse or Ascii code my mind drew a blank, and when I thought about what to write, an alphabet book came to mind as the simplest thing to do. “A is for apple” is a classic, of course, and I took it from there. Finding food items for each letter was more difficult than I first expected. I had to ask for help with “U” – apparently there are no fruits or vegetarian dishes starting with “u” in English. I settled for “udon” noodles in the end. I had already finished, or at least I thought so, when I realized I had forgotten the letter X: Vanilla, Watercress, Yam, Zuccini:

Well, it turns out, “x” is another letter for which there is just nothing. So I decided to use a non-english word one last time and added xiaolongbao:
if you look carefully, you can see that I added the name of the food item in ascii code to each picture.

We’ll see whetehr it will enter the online gallery. Apparently they get so many entries by now that they select books to enter.

Oh, and for the finale a little bit of self-advertisement: With the new studio I can offer bookbinding sessions again, and a page has been added here. Would be great to welcome you to my studio!