Purple Chunky Book - Complete!

Today we met to assemble our Purple Chunky Books. For our Fearless Leader, this was the culmination of a massive training experience - how many different ways can you explain things to 12 women until they all get it? ;-)

For the rest of us, it was a really neat project to do. We each (well, most of us) made 2 4x4 pages, front & back, 12 copies of each, with the common theme of "purple". What we ended up with was a 17-page book (don't even try to figure that one out!) with samples of each person's art and their interpretation of "purple". It was REALLY a fun experience!

Here are the two pages, I came up with:

Page 1, Front & Back















Page 2, Front & Back












As we arrived with our pages in hand, our Leader punched them all for binding. Then we strategized the assembly - which pages would work best next to each other, either by theme, color, or lack-of-embellishment-infringement (would one page's stuff interfere with the previous page's stuff.) It all went amazingly smoothly, and within a few minutes, we had it all laid out.

We set up a collating line, where we each took a cover, then successive pages, followed by a back cover and a coil. Then we got to learn the art of getting the coil to line up with the holes, making sure to catch all the pages. Some people got it right away, some of us had to redo our books because we missed a page, or one page was upside down, etc. ALL of us learned a new respect for anyone that volunteers to do the binding for a group.

After the coils were trimmed and crimped, the embellishment began! We took extra ribbons, fibers, beads, really whatever we brought with us, and decorated the coil of the book.













This is my final embellished book (left) with one of my pages showing (right). Yes, the cat decided to investigate the new object that had appeared in her realm, so I included her here for posterity. [I really tried to align these photos in the post, but Blogger was having NONE of that! ;-(]

We all voted, mostly democratically, and our next project will be an Alphabet theme. We will each take 2 or 3 letters and do a page for each. We gave ourselves the Summer to make it through, and we are all really looking forward to it.