Saturday, November 10, 2007

Pillow Book I, day 2

It's a Good News/Bad News kind of a day. Good News first — I peeled the printed tulle off their newsprint backings and they looked fine. I stacked them up and the image appeared!

Here's 3 sheets of tulle (printed with the same image) stacked together; you can still see the newsprint underneath.



Here's 8 sheets of the tulle stacked together, and you can't see the newsprint underneath anymore.



The same stack of 8 sheets over the gray silk, which hopefully will be the pillow covers. So you can read the image well. With just 1 sheet over the gray silk, you can not see the image at all (which is why there isn't a photo of it).



Now the Bad News. From previous experiments, I knew that the edges of the tulle pages needed to be bound by something, otherwise they stuck to each other easily. So my solution was to bind the edges with the same gray silk that the pillows will be covered in. Only there were several problems —

1. I chose a very thin silk because I did not want to introduce a lot of thickness to the edges, which would make the center of the pages sink, and the image not line up. Well, the silk was hard to work with. I spent 5 hours and almost finished 6 edges...and my back hurts like crazy.

2. It took a lot of working with the silk and the tulle, and the tulle pages were pretty much stretched out of shape by the time I bound 3 of the 4 edges.

3. But the worst problem is that, well, it looks pretty bad! The edges are not straight, they don't line up, and I had a very hard time finishing the corners (hard to work on those 1/4" edges with that slippery silk).

Here are the 2 sheets I bound, stacked up. I only bound 3 edges per sheet, leaving the 4th edge open for now, since that will be the spine edge of the book.



So back to the drawing board. Now I'm thinking I'll finish the edges with a thin paper, maybe the Japanese tissue paper. But that introduces another problem...I won't have a ready solution for the spine edge. With the fabric binding, I could sew through the fold easily. If I laminated it with the tissue paper, I won't have the fold to work with. I suppose I could laminate all 4 edges with the tissue paper, but also use the gray silk for the spine edge.

Here's the previous entry on this project.

Well, time to go sleep on it.

6 comments:

Yehudi said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

maybe you should serge the edges instead of binding them. btw, I can see Mr. Densiton really well.

shumei

fingerstothebone said...

Serging the edges won't help. The reason why they stick to each other is because the cut edges of the netting material catch on the holes in the net. So the cut edges have to be completely enclosed in something else.

Yeah, I was really surprised how well you can see the image.

gl. said...

thanks for showing us the whole painful process: throwing yourself on the grenade of frustrating gocco so we don't have to!

fingerstothebone said...

Um, the Gocco Grenade? That sounds rather heroic, when I'm just having some fun. If I'm throwing myself on a grenade, it's completely unintentional!

Anonymous said...

have you checked out what kind of serge is available? Because I've seen serged edges where they completely enclosed the fraying edge and leave a silky smooth edge. I think it has to do with the stitch available. I strongly suggest you check out sergers. I'll see if I can find the term which describe the stitch.

Shumei