All heart

Big silvery love heart with open weave pattern?

Brass styled love heart, woven like a web?

Or a big hearted medal, hanging from a chain?

Book of Nature

One: Single signature, wrapover cover, sealed with a waxed cotton loop over a copper brad. Book opens to felt fabric on both sides for stitching and pinning. Papers include notepaper, recycled papers from Frogmore Paper Mill, French waxed paper, and Nepalese tissue paper. Pockets throughout. The leather used for each book has been weathering the wind and rain for a year as part of an erosion project, brought indoors, washed and treated with restorers. Beech leaves from the tree outside.

Two: Four signatures combining corn hair papers, note papers, khadi, and snatches of handmade paper. Belt fastening: cover splits into two, revealing an inner and outer, a place to store small precious items. Inside organza and double layer nets to trap leaves and organic materials.

Three: A5 in size, containing notepapers, scattered cartridge papers, amate paper from Mexico, and pockets made from recycled paper on inner covers. A heavier book to make a statement on a desk. Great for collecting, journalling, sketching.

Army

Creative wedding

I set out with ideas about Parisian Art Noveau, but then I got distracted by a spray of bridal lace, and this little book of love remade itself. Here it is, in trembling suede with a fragile edge, a memory of a curving spray of leaves, and a chain that connects us to an emblem of love.

So I set out again looking for my effortless Parisian grace, only this time looking for a more theatrical line and curve, with a dash of French poetry of love tucked inside to remake a little book as this.

Now I'm at a fork in the road, because should I go all Folies Bergère with crimson reds? or should I sink into the delicate softness of beiges, whites, soft creams and extra lace? Decisions, decisions.

Purple, butterfly

The biggest butterfly I can catch, snatched and threaded with bead to the cover; inside silky net, felt, organza and lace; torn paper edge; envelopes, folds and tucks for special words; fastening by internal ribbon; the back inside cover stitched with fragile amate paper: to say, Your Special Day.

One day, while walking in a wood,

Imagine ... you are walking one day through a wood. There on the ground, right in front of an old hawthorn, is a battered and tattered book, bound in worn leather, the colour of dusky orange earth.

You pick up this old book, glancing this way and that, to see who might have dropped it. How strange!

The back of the book is skewered with a thick red pencil made from a hewn tree branch, its centre carefully hollowed and stuffed with what look like dried juices of ripe holly berry. And the cover! It’s like no ordinary cover you’ve ever seen before.

As you turn the gnarled book in your hands, the shape speaks softly to you - here are a pair of stiff pointed ears, sticking right out the top of the book! And there! From the inside, a tuft of white beard! 

You glance over your shoulder, and stuff the book quickly into your woodsman’s bag, because - you know it now for sure - this book belongs to one who lives close by. This book is a book dropped in haste. Someone scurrying with the urgency of escape - perhaps to the bundle of roots they call home - let this book fall from their grasp. This is their book! And soon, very soon, they’ll return quietly in search of it, because between its precious pages are the spells that whisper to the reader where to seek the tendrils of Gold that coil within the earth.

This is the most precious book of the wood.

For this is the Book of the Troll.

Wise woman

We women sometimes have too much experience at too young an age. What do we do with it? We have to celebrate it all: the brave and the good; the bonkers and bizarre; the mad, bad and dangerous. These experiences combined, make us who we are.

Here then, the Woman's Journal.

Described by one woman who viewed this as umami.