Are You Book Enough Challenge, May Theme - Break

For some reason when I  think about the word Break  I also think about  the words mend, fix and repair. I had quite a few ideas for this theme but seemed to always come back to the idea of the mend, possibly due to the stitching that I do and my preference to mend things rather than discard them.

My first book is a concertina book containing a series of mends. The fabric was a piece of found linen than was very dirty, with extensive rust stains and many holes and tears. I decided to ‘break’ the strip into smaller pieces and make a collection of mends. Inspired by the Japanese technique of Boro.

The concertina book has a little flap that holds the individual pieces in place for storage but also allows for easy romaval of each mended piece.

An example of a feature mend attached from behind. The text on backing patch can be seen or read through the tears.

A few of the individual mends

The second book was made a a bit of fun to entertain my grandson. This also inspired by Japanese methods of mending. Kintsugi is an ancient and traditional method used for repairing pottery using gold and lacquer. The idea being that the mend be celebrated and admired for it’s own beauty.

Kintsugi Eggs is an egg shaped concertina book. Each egg shaped pages are covered with cut papers to represent breaks. Gold paint used in between the cut paper. The printed papers are from my stash of gelli plate prints.

Each side of the egg shape is covered.