I wrapped up the second book in the series of three I’m working on late last night. The covers for this book came from a board that I uncovered while tidying up. I remember buying this board, a piece of Fiddleback Maple because it had some spalling along the edge and I wanted to work it into the design. While the wood looked beautiful on it’s own, I wanted just a touch of contrast so I did some inlay using a scrap of Bloodwood with the same technique I used on the small Walnut Journal.
Pretty much a lazy choice on my part but hey, the tools were already out. To get everything where it needed to be, the back cover ended up just short of the length it needed to be and I was just going to live with it but I realized I had enough left on the Bloodwood scrap so I edge-glued it onto the back cover, trimmed it up and brought it up to the right length. It’s difficult to see in the photo, but you look closely you can just make it out along the bottom of the back cover, it’s only about 1/4″ wide. This book is 8 1/2″ X 5 1/2″ – enjoy.
This year the 4th of July fell on on Wednesday which as you might imagine left an awkward space in the middle of the week. Binding some books seemed like a good way to fill the space so I grabbed a package of Fabriano Artistico and began tearing it down. Beyond the mid-week lull, the other factor driving me was that my small Mesquite Journal only had two pages left in it. It’s a small journal, about 4 3/4″ X 3″ and I made it from the branch of a mesquite tree that a storm took down. Over the time I’ve been working in this journal I’ve really gotten to like the size so I wanted another one the same size. Here’s a shot of the Mesquite Journal i you haven’t seen it.
5 1/2″ X 8 1/2″ is also a favorite size so after a few quick calculations six sheets yielded enough for three books. One 5 1/2″ X 8 1/2″, one 4 3/4″ X 3″ and a micro-book 1 1/2″ X 2 7/8″. The first book out of the three completed was the one I intend to replace the Mesquite one with. The covers are walnut burl. Like the mesquite journal, I inlaid the cover with a contrasting wood, in this case fiddleback maple. Here it is.
I must have had my head down because I completely missed this one. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know that I almost exclusively use Fabriano Paper in my hand bound journals. While I use the journals I make, there are still plenty of Moleskines, Rhodia notepads and Quattro pads around the house and it seems like they multiply like rabbits. A couple of days ago while I was browsing through a Utrecht store I discovered the Fabriano EcoQua.
The Fabiano EcoQua comes in a variety colors which include Lemon, Lime, Raspberry, Wine, Black, Blue, Stone, and Orange. A variety of sizes and binding styles are available also and i snagged the A5 size which is around 8 1/4″ X 5 3/4″. The paper inside is dot ruled with light grey dots and the pad is bound along the side with a glued binding. The front cover is a heavy textured card stock and the back cover is lightweight cardboard.
Here’s the front cover, you can see the texture and may be able to make out the Fabriano embossed into the cover.
Here’s a shot of the back cover. Not much there except for the details about the pad itself.
Here’s a photo of the binding. It’s fairly typical for a pad and is glued padding compound which is a fexible PVA adhesive. Like any other pad, you can easily pull off sheets of paper.
The pad is made from smooth 85gm paper. Side by side with a Rhodia, I’d say the the paper in the EcoQua is almost, but not quite as smooth and it doesn’t seem as opaque as the Rhodia paper either. The paper is off white and I want to say it leans toward a cool grey but that may just be the dot rule tilting my perception. The paper does take ink incredible well. I tested the pad with a Lamy Safari pen with a fine point and Pilot’s Iroshizuku Yama-Budo ink. It’s a great red-purple color and while it is a wet writing ink, the EcoQua took it without any problem. There was no feathering to speak of and it seem to dry fairly quickly. You can see a sample in the image below.
Here’s a little better detail of the ghost.
I still had some questions about the opacity of the paper so on the second sheet of the pad I jotted down some text with a Lamy Safari pen with an extra fine nib and Noodler’s Black ink. If you look closely you may be able to see the text on the second page ghosting through just about half-way down the page. Not a show stopper, but something to be aware of if ghosting is something that really bothers you.
If you’re environmentally conscious, Fabriano’s got that covered. The pad is made in Italy in an environmental responsible way that is certified by the FSC. The paper is chlorine and acid free and is recyclable.
Overall, I really like these pads and I’ve already gone back and purchased a couple more to strategically locate throughout the house and office. Since I focused on the A5 adhesive bound pad in this review, I really didn’t enumerate all the options that are available so here’s a video about the product that I found on YouTube that will give you a better idea of the other options.
It started innocently enough. A few weeks ago while running through the weekly list of spelling words with my son I doodled a cockroach in the margins of the page. A week later it was a picture of a dinosaur and after that my son expected a drawing. A few weeks later, I got home late and didn’t have a change to draw anything so the spelling list went back to school with nothing but list of words.
The next day, I got a note from the teacher explaining that she couldn’t accept my son’s homework because the drawing was missing and that made it incomplete. I had to break out the watercolors and whip something up so he’d get credit for his assignment. And just when I thought he days of the teacher sending notes home about me was over…
I’ve been remiss in posting over the last few months. I’ve been working on another project which has been burning up a lot of time but now that I’ve wrapped that up, I think I can get back on track.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the last PLAY Retreat. Teesha and Tracy Moore have decided to terminate their large art retreats for a variety of reasons and its been a tough haul knowing that I probably won’t make it back to Fort Worden anytime soon. This time, I took just about nothing with me except for a handful of fine-line pens and a book of Peerless Watercolors. The retreat had no specific focus this year like it has in the past, just forty artists working away.
One of the things we did do was some light painting that everyone seemed to enjoy. Tracy used his Lomos while I went digital. here are a couple of the nicer shots I got from the light painting sessions.
While I brought very little in the way of art materials I did bring a couple of lights in addition to my camera, and offered to do portraits for anyone who wanted them. One of the people who took my up on the offer was Lisa Cheney-Jorgensen. While most people we’re interested in something a little more traditional, Lisa had a special request — she wanted a pose she had seen in a dream so she could make it part of here dream journal. Here’s the shot.
A couple of hours after I gave a print of this image to Lisa, it was already in her journal. I’ll miss PLAY.
