When I was looking for paper for my He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven project I wanted some very nice, light, holey paper to go behind the calligraphy layer. I never did find anything suitable (which is fine, turns out I wouldn't have had room anyway for it), but I did find two lovely pieces that fit the description in white.
I'm not sure if you can see the second one very well. It's semi-transparent mulberry paper with little gold flecks in it.
This got me thinking that I should find a nice snow-related poem or quote to make into a book. It was kind of confusing trying to find something short of in the public domain like that just on Google, but eventually I found the University of Toronto's online library, where they had a list of 19th century Canadian poets. Only it couldn't be searched by subject, only author! I didn't want to go through every single one until I found something, but I underestimated how much we write about winter. Almost every poet listed had one, and I soon had a big stack I liked to choose from. I eventually did a bit of extra research on one of the poets, and found this one:
The Frosted PaneCharles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)
One night came Winter noiselessly, and leaned
Against my window-pane.
In the deep stillness of his heart convened
The ghosts of all his slain.
Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,
And fugitives of grass, --
White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,
He drew them on the glass.
I'm going to make a star book, only I'm going to try and ignore the different divisions of the pages, and try something a little different and off-centre.
Here is the calligraphy. It's very faint on purpose, so I'll have to figure out a better way to photograph it. It's just my handwriting. I'm sticking with a bit of a casual feel. Plus I'm feeling just too lazy to practice for hours and do it formally! Which wouldn't be as nice with the poem anyway, I think. Well... we'll stick with that explanation. Once this is dry and ready for the lines to be erased I'm going to make large sections of cut-outs in snow/frost type patterns. I can't make them quite as big as I was planning because the writing took up more room, so they may end up kind of meandering all over instead of being in nice rectangular (window-like) areas. But that will be fine, I think. If anyone asks I had it all planned out from the start.
I'm so pleased with how this one turned out because I think it really takes advantage of the lovely materials I had to work with. It only opens just half past-way, so not truly a star book, but it works on this one.
Yet another type of white paper for the cover, but with a blue silk spine so that it's not too boring. I only had very thin white ribbon, so I put three on either side, with is just the detail it needed. Happy accident! Speaking of accident, there was a tiny bit of pen on the other side that ran when the glue got wet, opps! Good thing it's blue, so it's not so bad (I hope!). Anyway, you aren't supposed to look of the cover, you're supposed to put it on display:
