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).

I Made a Ritual for You

So You Won't Have to Think About What To Do Next

roll the dice, swallow stone, light the candle, to not be alone

the statue is each other's you.

Saint Peter's Cross

did not begin as sacrilege

but was inverted to show St. Peter's better side

coptic bound,

altered book

It's Hardly Ever Fall, Here

No matter where I go to find the seasons I will hear of this place

Sounds will travel underground and curve moody tunnels

Avoiding a certain subterranean species of word eating beetle

To make it the distance of a neon future that is blindingly keeping the ending a secret

this time last year, I slept in a tent

Light and Shade: The Sun Shifted and We Are Staid

Dear Geography,

I traversed the places where I have no desire to spend any time

To find that the things I don't want are relics buried in our common ground

Yes, I am avoiding you.

This is a book on which I tried a new idea for binding. I kept the spine of the altered book in tact, along with its first and last pages. I treated the first and last pages as an accordion, and the valleys of the accordions as the spine of the "book blocks". The book blocks are just single pages or pages folded in half, then glued with Yasatomo Nori paste to the valleys of the accordion. The book is supposed to act as a collage/scrap book forum. The problem with the binding is that the accordion doesn't keep tension on the pages and they slide and don't stay in a tight order, the way coptic stitch naturally does. I don't think I will be using the binding method ever again, but I think the mood of the book is pleasant, nostalgic, and leaves room for addition in a positive way.