Safe Travels: A Ritual for Those Who Love

To Abby and Mark: A ritual celebrating the journey of love bonded in the ceremony of marriage.

Here is a ritual for your journey. Take it literally;
The time for reflection and the figurative is in the future.
1. Place the butterfly in folded hands of prayer until the wings
can be spread across the land you leave behind.

                    2. Make a wish in a body of water that's new to you both,

casting the tokens far or close (as long as they stay behind
with any remaining apprehensions)

                    3. In the final dark before your arrival,

            scatter glitter like ashes and light your candles, so 

each reflection of light on gold manifests a glimmer of

creativity in your future together

Final cover and spine, with new details, typewritten titled

Plans for Abby and Mark's ritual, the book, the spine

The new cover, step one; details for cover and spine,
typewritten

Details for inside cover page: Safe Travels for Those Who Love:
                Abby & Mark

original and altered page one, with room for
notes from the ritual

original and altered page: May the next trip you take together
be the first in a series of memorable journeys
Safe travels to you both, and to the love between you two
a message to the traveling newleyweds

Title Page

Gluing the edges of the pages, after the first
pages, and title page, to prepare the book
block for dremeling compartments

Traces the ritual objects, dremel the shapes, create
a border with gesso, use a similar process to
embellish and unify the ritual objects page with
gold tissue paper

The Ritual

Using Every Part of the Animal

This is an old photo album I found at the Reninger Extravganza flea
market, and then gutted.

These are the guts from the album, used to frame a few
things around my room.

Rolls of paper for the new album book block

Book block cut and clamped, ready for binding

Binding materials: white corrugated linen thread, curved needle,
beeswax. Binding using coptic stitch

Book block binding complete

Book block ready to be glued into gutted cover, and completed

Completed album with end pages as the finishing touches

Here's A Charm

Made in the fashion of folk magic;
A passport for the tourism of celebration.
May your quest to enjoy every moment last...
From now on

The chain is made from hand crocheted, corrugated, gold linen thread.

         

The charm is made from an appropriated gem pin, embellished with three feather charms that came from the flea market held at the Florida fair grounds. The necklace is a birthday present.

Sleeping the Whole Time, a Mummy May awake

And Wish to be Surrounded by That Which is Familiar

you are the faint smell of thistle and shade; i will wash your skin in the unrecorded depths of the sinkhole beside the asylum

i always thought something without a heart was living there, beating the other species at their own game

last night i dreamed of you in the seat next to me

and it wasn't relief or shame that i felt, giving you a second chance

A Few Thank Yous and a Couple Correspondences

An Alteration to Create a Safe Place to Store Altars:

This is a small project I took on, to alter a couple things I found, for the daughter of my friend. I was drawn to buy these two things, without a specific purpose for them in mind, and it turns out they complement each other well in the function of leaf collecting. Leaf collecting is the main interest of my friend's daughter. Although without saying too much, I want to add that she is also a keeper of collections, and from what I am told, keeps them in the form of altars. New minds creating their own classification systems inspires me.

The flower press is old school, and probably labor intensive. But I imagine it still takes the moisture from, and flattens drying plants as well as any two other heavy objects. The scrap book has wonderful manila pages, no lines, so the contents are yet to be defined.

I wanted to make something not too gimmicky, or particular, still sophisticated, and hopefully user friendly enough to be functional.

There is a place for a table of contents, and an index. And to keep the end use optional and free, I titled the book, but just as A Collection of Things.

You Are My Specimen; Let Me Take You With Me

A Pocket Album

let's move on

from trying to recreate the moment with the watusi and the grappling hook

by the time I attached to you

you fell through my colander like a fistful of sand

years passed

before I came home to find you crawling through the window of my new address

while my frame scraped your spine, we grew embarrassed in our own ways

Materials For a Photo Booth Pocket Photo Album: old book, box cutter (or x acto), glue (preferably archival), some durable paper (for the spine, and inside), straight edge

I found this Centennial Pocket Album at a thrift store on a trip to Brooklyn.

I liked the idea of a pocket album so much that once I altered the original, I decided to make reproductions.

I think it's simple and low cost enough that the process is worth sharing. Start with an old book. Cut the spine and all the pages away from the book.

Separate front and back covers into three equal pieces each. Slice the edge away, and peel it off (it doesn't necessarily have to be the existing spine, but it is a convenient marker).

Burnish the underlying layer to make it smooth for the next step.

Take two facing pieces from front and back, leaving a quarter inch of space between them. Then, put glue, (I use yasutomo nori paste), down on the raw edges of the spine, and put the durable paper over the paste, leaving the two pieces as square as possible. Gently burnish the pasted edges, and let them dry. Fold the edges of the durable paper to the inside, and fasten them there with more paste.

The left picture is the original Centennial Album. The end paper in each the middle and left picture is the durable paper cut to the full length and width of what you're left with. Then, two strips of any miscellany can be pasted at each of their end edges (the middle of the strips left without paste, so the photo booth album pics can slip in and out, easily).