If you read this blog you might have seen my fabric panels for Ann Morton’s vast and amazing ‘Violet Protest Project’, currently on display at the Phoenix Art Museum.
While building the first set of 8×8″ panels last year I was struck by how well the idea would work in book art form: red and blue fabric pages, with contrasting red and blue embroidery and beadwork.
We are a Violet Nation right now, with conservative (red) and progressive (blue) ideas pushing and pulling us into very different futures. I started gathering word-pairs to play up the idea.
I already had blue constructed-fabric panels roughly 2×6.5″, for an unrelated project thought up in 2015. This January I gathered those and made vivid red-toned panels to match: 20 pages in all, to be worked up in five signatures of four pages each, two blue and two red.
A tooled leather belt from Goodwill was the right size for covers, once I gave its two cut pieces a blue stain and strengthened them with Redheart-wood doweling.
Each page group superimposes contrasting ideas on the base fabric: red letters on blue, blue letters on red. Here’s an in-progress shot of the red pages.
Each piece is multiple layers of constructed fabric in machine-sewn patches, hand-embroidery, and beaded accents. Each 2-part page is edged in blue-violet shot cotton and Guatemalan purple cotton fabric, and joined by a strip of dark purple leather.
I made the spine of reinforced cloth in blue-violet shot cotton and red patchwork constructed fabric, and fringed the leading edge with cotton embroidery thread and beads.
I sewed the signatures (by hand) onto the spine, then glued the spine ends onto the insides of the leather covers. Once that dried, I drilled out holes along the edges to further secure the covers (and add more handy spots for beads and tassels.)
This is the completed book. The only thing I have left to do is weave the beaded collars for the nine tassels.
As pretty as it turned out, this book is a gut-punch to read.
Added, June 18, 2021: Oops! *Now* it’s finished. I added beads on the page fore-edges, around the tassel heads, and as banding across the top and bottom of the spine. 