Water World – Now with Explanations

As promised, now I am back with more explanations regarding this book, after we agreed on the book arts forum that I may now show off this book.

As you can see it is called “water world”. The theme for the swap was “something new” and we were supposed to use a material that we have not used before for making books and preferably a material that is rarely used for books.

I had a hard time thinking of something interesting. My first attempts at making a book for the swap were maybe better when it comes to craftmanship but I hope this one is funnier and more in the line of the spirit of the swap.

I wanted to use the “new and unusual material” not on the covers, but for the pages of the book. I thought about different materials,  and the first real plan involved using bones for them but it is surprisingly hard to buy them in a size sufficient for book pages *and* they are surprisingly expensive! I also considered some plastic wrappers that turned out to either tear too easily or they were too much or too few look-through for my taste. It was my dear husband who suggested using bubble wrap when I was complaining about these difficulties. (I am a bit ashamed to admit it but it needs to be said that it was not completely my idea.)

The rest of the design, the choice(s) of *how*to use the material inside the book are again totally mine.

I chose the sew them in a stab stitch with a green leather cord, as you can see. The front cover is my own paste paper (made with tapioca starch paste).  The back cover is a piece of board, also covered with green paste paper.

Essentially the book only has two pages each of which consists of four layers: first a piece of bubble wrap with some of the bubbles colored blue (supposed to resemble air bubbles in water like the whole bubble wrap anyway), then a layer of bubble foil with a fish (or two) sketched on them, a third bubble wrap layer with some sea floor motif (I remember drawing a sand castle but can’t remember what’s on the other page), and at last another piece of the paste paper (same as on the cover ) as background and as a separation between the first and the second three dimensional page.

What interests me most about this book is its three dimensionality. Creating and using 3D in a otherwise traditional book format drives me every now and then to try new constructions. Like I started out in the book arts with making my “books with holes” and the latest piece that I also count into this category is “to touch and to cut”. I don’t know why the sea motif is important to me or comes to my mind when  I do 3D books.

And there is something about this book that I really like and that you unfortunately can’t experience – it makes such a pleasant sound when you turn the pages! And I like to touch and hold the book as such, with it being much lighter than the thickness suggests.

Have a good start into the week, thanks for reading!