Sunday, December 30, 2007

Pillow book IV, day n+1

Took a break from book III today and gave book IV a think. Last I worked on this, I made the form for it, and decided to have a clay artist make the dice/swiss cheese blocks for me; I sent her a drawing of what I had in mind, and today, I got this 'status report' from her:



Don't they look great!? I think once they're sitting on the gameboard-pillow, they will look like both dice and swiss cheese.

And I also figured out how I want book IV to function. Originally, I'd laid it out sort of like a Monopoly game, with different words occupying squares along the edges of the board. Each word would have 1-6 sheets of tulle, making them difficult-easy to read. And the dice would just sit on the board. But it wouldn't really be playable.

So today, I figured out how it can be a playable game (although perhaps not a fun game to play) — each word has 6 sheets of tulle, but they'd only be stitched down on one side. There's a deck of cards. You roll the dice (but of course the clay dice would not really be roll-able either). Move your piece the number of spaces the dice indicate. You retrieve the top card, which tells you how many sheets of the tulle to flip over.

As you play, the words become less and less legible.

This means I'll need to print cards too, but that shouldn't be too much trouble.

So the plan is to print the words tomorrow, after I run some errands.

5 comments:

gl. said...

those look -great!- who did you get to make the clay for you?

fingerstothebone said...

Sara Swink (http://claycircle.com/). I know her from Portland Open Studios.

gl. said...

good call. she's awesome. i love that you're going to make a game of it, too.

Anonymous said...

Those swiss cheese dice look awesome. Wow, suddenly I have a craving for cheese.

fingerstothebone said...

anjali -- thanks! I'll pass on the wonderful remarks to Sara.