Leather Memory Album

 

I made this for a retiring Carleton College Music professor.  I took a big piece of leather to my favorite letterpress guy who does work for both colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton), so he had the college seal. He letterpressed the Carleton seal on the leather, with which I then covered the boards of the album. Unfortunately, the picture of the seal is on my external hard drive (with all of my photos from the last 6 years that Doug dropped and has promised to take to somebody to retrieve my photos and 10,000 music CDs...), so you'll just have to imagine how beautiful the letterpressed leather looks. Then I lined the boards with that pretty black stringy paper, and added a fly sheet with torn pieces of music in it. The album is filled with letters to Phillip from former students and colleagues. I was just commissioned to make another for another prof retiring in the spring. Should be fun!

Piano Hinge Binding

I made this book for Paula's Greg, who wrote a collection of poems about gryphons. I thought leather would be a good cover for a mythical creature, and I wanted to try a piano hinge binding which would secretly contain a picture of a gryphon. I put each poem in its own tri-fold signature and painted a chopstick with which to hold the piano hinge. The endsheets are from this cool paper table cloth my mom brought me from Norway - she knows me well enough to bring me things like that from foreign countries.