The marriage theme continues for one more blog post, but not about my own wedding this time. Last year, I was honoured to have been asked by a friend to make a guest book for his wedding. Arthur is in fact marrying Emily today, the 27th June 2014, in Herefordshire, so I thought it very apt to post this up now to mark the occasion! Unfortunately I am unable to make it as I have other commitments in France, plus I will be making a trip back to London in only a few weeks time for another wedding, so I will have to make do with seeing the photographs instead.
From the start, I knew that the colour scheme had to be green and brown, as that is the respective surnames of the couple. With this in mind, the fact they are having a country wedding, and that they love their allotment, the design came very easily to me! I decided to try out my scarf jointing techniques and put together a patchwork of fields.
Arthur provided me with plain folded paper for the sections, and as the sections were quite thick, and because this was a book for people to write in, I chose to bind it on stubs so that it would lie flat when open. The sections were eight pages thick, so I folded the stubs accordingly to create the same thickness at the spine. Each section was sewn onto it’s stub using 35/3 medium/light linen thread. The sections were then sewn together onto three tapes at the stubs, using heavier gauge 25/3 linen thread, in order to create some swell for rounding and backing. The tapes were then laced into the boards before covering.
I thought it would be appropriate to use a map of where the wedding is on the endpapers and paper doublures. To highlight the location of the venue, I circled it with an embroidered outline, and then coloured around this line.
The cover itself all started with me digging through my box of leather pieces, trying to find as many different browns and greens as possible! I then drew out a grid and jointed the pieces together, and made a mini version for the test board.
I then thought about appropriate things to have in each field, including carrots, sheep, crop circles, cabbages, flowers, and of course a tractor. I made notes on the reverse of the leather to try and keep track!
I was trying to think of ways to include their names into the design and thought it would work well for this, plus the date, to be written in the tyre tracks of the tractor. I used handle letters and blind-tooled the words in first, using a masking tape guide to sight them.
Once I had blind-tooled the letters, I painted glaire into the impressions and then added gold. The rest of the tyre tracks were carbon tooled using a hand-made finishing tool in a pattern to match with the tread of the wheels.
Once finished, I experimented with a few places inside and outside the house for the photography. I am a fairly amateur photographer so thought the more pictures I have the better!
The book itself was given to Arthur and Emily a couple of weeks ago, and until they had seen it I didn’t want to spoil the surprise so only posted up fairly abstract shots on previous blog posts. Now they have seen it I am able to write this and to add it to my website for all to see!
