2005: january 08
Doctors Without Borders book
This is the book that I made for Stephanie to use in her fundraiser/draw for Doctors Without Borders. More on the project is available from Knitters Without Borders.
I made (almost) everything that you see. The felt is made from white fleece that I dyed with "edible" dyes (five flavours of Kool-Aid and two different liquid cake dyes). There are two different sheep breeds (blue faced leicester and corriedale) and one angora rabbit represented. The green is Gir Fur; the yellow and orange are corriedale and the red and purple are blue faced leicester. The angora did not felt well and in one spot I have hand embroidered the angora to the sheep felt using the same silk thread that is used on the spine. The cord is spun by me on my mother's spinning wheel which she brought with her from New Zealand (she spent a year in Australia before I was born with my dad and sister) using fleece from the same dye lot as the book.
The spine is made from oak. The binding itself is based on a medieval account book and is also known as a "long stitch" binding. Each section of pages is sewn into the spine individually with a unique sewing pattern. The strip of felt is sewn into the spine so that it won't fall off. Although bookbinding typically uses linen thread for sewing, I've used silk thread which is just as strong, and much prettier because of the sheen (plus it's silk and knitters like silk!).
The felt cover is lined with two sheets of red Japanese kozo paper (from the Japanese Paper Place). Both are hand made and hand dyed. The bottom one is a red paper used primarily to add colour depth to the top sheet. The top sheet is referred to as a "silk" paper (although there is no silk in it). The term refers to the long strands of kozo (Japanese mulberry bush) that are in the paper. Kozo is used to make paper, and it is also used for the inner lining on clothing. For clothing it is typically treated with Konnyaku (Devil's tongue root). The fibers are strong enough that it can also be spun and woven (similar to flax and linen). The paper lining often outlasts the fabric exterior. The inside front pocket is the least exciting. It's Italian card stock (machine made). But the colour was right, so why not, eh?
There are three kinds of pages in the book: blank white (heavy weight drawing paper) , graph paper and "summary" pages (same paper as the blank sheets) for knitting projects. The book has 40 summary pages plus all the space for pictures and patterns. All of the pages are carefully interspersed so that there is always a different combination of graph/white/project pages. No two project pages are side by side.
This book is not for sale. If you are interested in one like it, please email me. A book like this would be approximately $350. Variations with only some of the components (hand made felt, or wood spine with paper cover, etc) would be less.
