Judy Coates Perez • Blog

Metal and Canvas Books

I began by tearing canvas into 4″ x 8 ” pieces and painting both sides with gesso. I think if I were to start again I would tear them into 4 ” x 8 1/2″ pieces to allow for the bulk of paint and collage. When the pages were folded in half the book got fairly fat and the pages were a little short in width.
I painted the pages with fluid acrylic washes.
These are the semi finished pages for two books, the blue on the left will be Birds & Bees the yellow on the right is Flora.
There are images that are drawn, painted and transfered onto tea bags, pieces of rice paper, printed tissue paper, wrapping paper, pieces of painted fabric, scraps from other projects, transfers on fabric, painted canvas and a sewing pattern. All adhered with gel medium and machine stitching.

I folded the canvas pages in half and clamped them to help set the fold.
I tore 4″ x 2″ strips of canvas to use on the binding. Since the canvas was not painted I did some zigzag stitching around the edge, then positioned it over the center of the stack of pages, taping it in place to secure it for stitching.
I stitched through the four layers on my Bernina sewing machine (my Janome would not sew through the bulk).
I clamped the stitched book again to help it hold the fold.
Walnut Hollow sells a very strong double sided tape to adhere the metal to other surfaces. I found that it will even stick to canvas. I attached the tape and burnished it well to the canvas and then peeled away the paper backing to stick it to the metal, burnishing it to make a good bond with the metal.

I finished the binding by adding some cloth book binding tape. If you have a sewing machine with metal gears (Bernina, Pfaff) you can sew along the edge of the book cloth tape thru the copper. A top stitching needle will work fine.

My next post will show the whole book page by page.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 4:00 PM. It is filed under Creative Process, tutorials and tagged with books, canvas books, metal, mixed media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.