Fearghal's Book

I have a new(ish) nephew! He's a dote and also happens to be my Godchild. I recently made him a present which is a book about his short life so far. The book includes details of his family tree, the day he was born and other famous folk he shares his birthday with. There's also spaces throughout the book for his parents to fill in as he grows up.

The portraits in the book are a mixture of mono-print and watercolour. The line quality of the mono-print combined with the subtle pastel water colours enabled me to achieve the softness I was after in the drawings. It was a slightly different way for me to work but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Some of the other spreads are more design based where I collaged different photos and graphics together. The pages are french folded and hand bound using a single sheet bind technique.

A book for my mother

I've been a bit of a hermit this past week as I've been working on this book as a surprise present for my mother. She's a primary school teacher and has just retired. She  worked for 34 years in St. Clare's N.S. in Ballyjamesduff, mainly teaching junior and senior infants - she even taught me! 

The book is a souvenir of her time working at the school and captures the highlights of her career there. Over the years the school has changed and grown from being a 4 teacher convent school attended by only Irish children, to a multi-cultural 20 teacher school. I collected lots of old pictures and stories from staff and former pupils at the school and made the illustrations based on this material. Here are some of the spreads - it's 50 pages in total. 

It was great fun to make and I hope she enjoys her retirement - she deserves a rest after all that teaching!

Pogonology in progress

I've come to the conclusion that things take approximately four times longer to do than I think they will! Producing this book has been a very labour intensive process and involved a lot of planning. It was a step by step process - Screen printing the illustrations, aligning and overprinting the letterpress, trimming down to size, folding the sheets, embroidering each page, binding the sheets and attaching the cover. Each stage posed different challenges to be overcome and I've learned a lot about hand-made processes.

Book binding

I've just completed an evening course in book binding at the London College of Communication. Over the 10 weeks we learned 7 different styles of binding.