Dragonfly Journal
16 cm. x 13 cm. x 1 cm., 32 p.
Cover: silk with block printed graphic.
Endpapers: cream mulberry paper
Block: cotton rag with botanical inclusion, quarto, with forest green mulberry paper liner
Stitching: kettle
The very first. Not the first book I ever made – I’ve made many over the years – but the first that I made after starting down this serious bookbinding and printmaking path, and the print on the cover is the first lino I ever cut. I wasn’t even documenting at that point, had a vague idea of the #100HandmadeBooks project but wasn’t sure if this one would “count”; so I’m reconstructing now, pulling old pictures off of Instagram and trying to remember the details of the project from 18 months ago.
I bought the block paper specifically for this project (the tamarind paper made me think of dragonfly wings, which inspired the linocut) but everything else – thread, liner and endpapers, the silk of the cover, the charms – came from my craft stash.
The charm has an abbreviated version of a Mary Oliver quote –
I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
– from the poem “Starlings in Winter.”
I wasn’t thinking in terms of use back then either. It’s too slim to be a working journal, but it could be an event guestbook, perhaps, or a themed commonplace book. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll make it into an artist’s book with collected quotes from nature writing. For now, it lives on my shelf of blank journals, waiting for its time and place.