Gift Book for my Mom

June 16, 2002. Here is the cover of the book I made for my mom for Mother's Day and her birthday. It's called "12 Months in Berlin, NY" (Berlin, NY is the town where my mom lives). I actually started this book with only an idea for the cover. I had some beautiful bright orange and bright pink tissue-thin paper, and I liked the idea of those showing through a cover, through little windows. You can't see the color contrast that much in this picture, but the pink is on the top and bottom, and the orange is in the middle. I dyed the binder's thread with grape Kool-Aid because I didn't like the stark white of the thread against the colorful cover. The thread turned out a soft pink color (plant fibers like cotton and linen won't take Kool-Aid as a dye as well as animal fibers like wool and mohair will), which was fine by me.

I started with the idea of doing a different page for every month, and went from there. I watercolored the inside papers first for "sky" and then did a collage of mountains on top of the sky, using a template to make the same mountains for every month. You can click on any month below to go to that page.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December