Creative Practice Fall B Wk 1 - Button Book

This week, we are learning about well-designed care environment.  After observing a friend’s studio and her creative practice, I fell in love with Book Art.  This last week was the Annual Book Art Jam were over 50 artists display their work.  The location was at a historic community center made of red brick and a beautiful landscape of trees, flowers, wooden benches.  I believe it was a well-designed building to offer care and support to the community. The event was buzzing with treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Books of all sizes were sold –some as small as a button, but most were the size of your mini iPad. Some books were going for $5 to $500.  Fascinated by a button book, and affected by the visual beauty of the environment, I purchased the button book in order to replicate it at my studio.

The artist, Ginger Burrell (www.gingerburrell.com) used decorative card stocks and a deep-orange color ribbon to connect the circles together. She also wrote a quote on the circles, “Butterfly, not quite bird and not quite flower.” The colors used are chocolate brown and deep-orange.  

To start off, I wondered if the ribbon was one long strip or many tiny strips, since I couldn’t feel the ribbon in the center of the circle, I decided to use on long strip because it would be easier. The next was to figure out what I wanted to create that was visually appealing. I ended up with a Zentangle pattern (http://zentangle.com/), because I was not able to create my button book at my art studio. Lack of transportation, I had to work on it from my sister’s home. The environment was chaotic. Her children’s clothes and toys were everywhere; the television on full blast and the husband is playing video games on the flat screen with the Bose speakers on loud. If I had my chose, this was not my ideal location for creative practice.  I was frustrated, but had no right to ask everyone to be quite, because I didn’t have transportation at the time. Instead, I used my brother-in-law’s computer room which was a little less noisy.

Once I decided to at least start on the project, it seemed that the noise and chaos fell away – as if the lights went out of the whole house and everyone decided to take a nap.  By using one of my niece’s block toys, I used as a template for my circle. Then, I wondered how Ginger was able to get the circles cute so perfectly. Well, it turns out that she used a circle die cutter, which I do not have. Out of frustration, I use a pair of scissors to cut the circles and glued the pieces together to form the button book. It did not look professional and I was not happy with it, but I was happy for the initial attempt.