Around the same time I went through my baby-album-making frenzy, I also finished up this small photo album I made for my husband. I made the book block months ago but only got around to casing it in recently. The album is about six inches square with 10 pages of black Arches Cover paper which are glued together. I’m not thrilled with the book block, but it was an experiment. I like the dramatic cover though.

At some point I will fill it with small black and white photos. But that’s for another day.

A couple weekends back I got into a bit of an album-making frenzy. I’d purchased a number of album blocks from Hollander’s in two sizes, and I spent a day just cutting bookboard and book cloth and Japanese papers, and another day gluing cases together and casing in the album blocks. The result was five albums (three large, two small) and a matching journal for one of the large albums.

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I made this album for the photos from my wedding, which was in July, 2003, so the album was long overdue. But my US naturalization interview is coming up in a couple of weeks, and our immigration lawyer recommended that we have our photos in albums rather than in iPhoto, so I got a little push to get it done.

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This is the second photo album from the premade text blocks I bought from Hollander’s. Now that I’ve given it to its intendended recipients (Merry Christmas, guys), I can post the picture.

Although the photo would indicate otherwise, this album is actually larger than the other one, at about 10″ high by 8″ wide.

Yesterday I was finally able to retire to my studio (I love saying that!) for a few hours to work on some books. I had a couple of premade photo album text blocks that I wanted to bind, and I also had prepared–cut, folded, creased and punched over the course of a few evenings, a few weeks ago–enough pages of Rives BFK for about four post-and-nut photo albums. In the end I cased in one of the premade albums and finished one of the post-and-nut albums, which was a pretty satisfying day’s play.

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This weekend I finally made a trip out to the Kozo Arts store on Union Street. They sell beautiful hand-bound guest books, photo albums, journals and the like, which are available in the store and through their web site. They also sell Japanese decorative papers, but only in the store. But they had a good selection of Yuzen (as well as some Indian and Thai papers, pretty ribbons, and some bookbinding supplies–they also offer classes), and between there and the nearby Paper Source store on Fillmore I picked up enough to keep me occupied for the next year.

I don’t know why I’m favoring the girly prints right now. I just prepared four photo albums’ worth of pages (96, to be exact: cut, folded, creased, and punched over three evenings) from black Rives BFK, and only a couple of these will go with it. But, today I received some cream-colored journal and album text blocks from Hollanders, so maybe I’ll use some of my new papers to case them in!

My favourite recent blog discovery is Cai Lun, which is devoted to making books and paper. It’s full of photos of the author’s experiments with different bindings. Very inspiring! I particularly want to try this technique of attaching the book block to the case using the same ribbon that supports the sections.