Gallery

Every once in a while we get to do what we like best: To work on a special commission for someone; to design and make a book that is unique and in some way different from the others we make. It’s where we really get a chance to stretch our creative muscles a little and come up with something special, something that fulfills not only our own creative urges, but also our client’s particular needs. Unfortunately, at the beginning, we kept no photo record of many of the special designs we created. However, we now are doing so, and this gallery should continue to grow as we continue create. We hope you enjoy some of these books as much as we do!

Click on the images below to enlarge. 

Sandy's Book » Perhaps the most special book we have ever created, the beginnings of this project go back more than 150 years.

Sandy had a little girl’s dress that had been in her family since it came out with her then two-year-old great, great, great grandmother on a wagon train bound for Nebraska from Ohio in about 1835. The dress had become a family heirloom. Unfortunately, the material had begun to deteriorate; the dress was falling apart from age, and would soon be gone. Sandy asked us if we could come up with a way to preserve the memory of the dress in a book.

The obvious way was to cover a book with the material from the dress, but it was too delicate and fragile for that. We brainstormed through several ideas before hitting on the perfect one: We tore what was left of the dress into tiny pieces, then made a batch of handmade paper with pieces of the dress embedded in each sheet. We then created a Coptic bound book with each page made from a full-sized sheet of this special paper. Sandy had a photo of herself in the dress when she was two years old, and another of her daughter wearing the dress when she was two. We combined the two photos, with her daughter in a starburst over her shoulder, for the front cover, and faintly printed each photo alternating, in dress red, on each page of the book. The final touch was a piece of lace from the bloomers that went with the dress as an accent trim on the front cover.

The book was presented to Sandy’s daughter as a wedding present, to be used as memory book. Probably the nicest thing for us about this project is that we had enough paper left over for us to present Sandy herself with her own, smaller, version of the book. The worst thing was having to part with the book after it was made – but knowing how much it was appreciated and treasured where it went made it much easier.

Seth & Tara » Seth and Tara designed their own wedding invitations, using a photo of themselves walking along Long Beach at sunset, holding hands. It was a beautiful photo, with the two of them in silhouette and the light playing on the wet sand. They wanted to continue this theme into their guestbook, so we printed the photo on the edge of the first page with their names and the date worked into the light spaces on the sand  and growing out of the left edge of the photo. This image was continued through the book in a light grey-scale, like a watermark on the page that could be written over or written beside. The pages were done without the traditional lines, to encourage guests to be more free-form and creative and write more than just their names and a simple comment. The cover was finished in a red and ivory colour that complemented the colours they had chosen for their wedding.