Pie In The Sky Press, 2017



French-style fine binding with laced-in boards. Bound in pale pink buffalo skin with back-pared onlays in printed calfskin, navy blue buffalo skin and handmade papers in peach, orange, burnt sienna, light blue, sage green, teal, mottled green, mint green, steel blue, baby blue (sprinkled) and ochre yellow. Paper sequins laser-cut from electric blue handmade paper and tacked on with embroidery floss. Additional details hand embroidered with various colors of cotton floss. Center onlay couched in sage green cotton floss and blind tooled. Edges foil tooled in metallic pink. Leather wrapped endbands in turquoise buffalo skin with wrapes of electric blue thread. Text sewn on stubs of purple and magenta paper. Island paste down in wheat straw paper in red from Hook Pottery Paper. Pale pink buffalo skin hinges. Handmade abaca/cotton paper flyleaves and endpapers in light burgundy.

Binding is housed in a clamshell box covered in ochre yellow goatskin and sided up with electric blue handmade paper. Title embroidered in light peach cotton floss around peach cowhide onlays. Blind tooled dots. Triangles and dots tooled in metallic pink Trays covered in peach handmade paper and lined with cream Silsuede.

20.4cm x 15.4cm x 2cm – Completed 2021

• Exhibited in Guild of Book Workers Traveling Exhibit: Wild/LIFE (2021-2022)
  
American Bookbinders Museum, San Francisco, CA
Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
North Bennet Street School, Boston, MA
Collins Memorial Library, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA
Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Lloyd Library and Museum, Cincinnati, OH

The beach has this power to make the world around you stand still. It can also transform you into the lounger, the explorer, the excavator, the builder, the poet and the gazer. The beach provides a microcosm that has the power to capture and reel you in for a closer look.

For the design on Rebecca Chamlee’s book, I wanted to play on the transformation that occurs when removing specimens from the beach. There is a certain brilliance and beauty displayed beneath the water, yet once removed these same specimens dry out and become something entirely new.