At the end of last year I decided to put myself forward and register two submissions for the Canadian Bookbinders & Book Artists Guild‘s exhibition: Kindred Spirits.

Then I had two unexpected surgeries (October was appendicitis and November was my gallbladder) and then I was teaching from January to April, which meant suddenly I was under a time crunch to submit in April! Not to mention I procrastinated on my own… All that to say, unfortunately I didn’t get too many behind the scenes photos but I’ll share what I have.

The first book I choose to make required a lot of digital set up as I decided to do a miniature book with a focus on cats. From the very beginning I knew I wanted a book that had to do something with cats as I knew LMM loved cats and so do I! I was partly inspired by a visit to PEI in 2019 with friends, we visited the Anne of Green Gables Museum and there was a cat sleeping in a doll cradle, it almost didn’t look real but it was and it was very cute. I debated different ways to incorporate cats, maybe a cat shape book? That felt too ambitious, so my cat book was also inspired from a visit to the University of Guelph archives where I saw LMM’s scrapbook filled with cat photos.

Below is a photo from the view outside our AirBnB door in PEI and a photo from LMM’s journal.

After researching a little I came across a poem called “In Memory of Maggie” and it was perfect. I was also very fortunate enough to access the scans of LMM’s photographs from the University of Guelph on their OurOntario database before it was temporarily taken offline! I selected a number of cat photographs and requested high resolution scans of them to include in my textblock.

It took some playing around, my original take (pictured above) created a textblock that was just a little too short. So I decided to do one line per page instead of two, but then I didn’t have enough photographs to compliment the lines. After some thought I came across the idea of little faded pawprints that would mosey across the pages until the end when it ended with a cat sitting off in the distance. The pictures below are during my attempts and they are darker than the final results.

Finally I had a textblock I was happy with! The textblock was then sewn on flattened cord and the spine sanded down after to be as smooth as possible, I also added a hollow tube.

I have a new friend who was also very helpful at this stage! While sewing and pressing the textblock as our new kitten, Soot, was very curious! She’s actually curious about all stages of the bookbinding process and wants to be actively involved…

For the endpapers, I choose to do a simple made endpaper. I was fortunate to be given a piece of marbled paper made by Shelagh Smith for my project. It was thin enough that even as a made paper on a miniature book it wasn’t too thick. It was also gorgeous and sparkled!

Now it was time to give it a binding, I decided to go with a full leather binding and try my hand at a little leather onlay. This was daring because I haven’t done a lot of leather onlays! Unfortunately this is where my pictures stop for behind the scenes on this book. The boards were laced in and the leather was pared and the book covered in. Once that was complete I cut out a tiny cat onlay (using LMM’s signature cat as a template), and using a small finishing tool added little gold whiskers. Thankfully my CBBAG chapter has finishing tools available to borrow!

I did consider this book cursed when I was working on it, if something could go wrong it did. I won’t list everything that went wrong and I know mostly only I will notice the little mistakes as in the end the book turned out quite nice and I was happy with the finished results. It could be better but I’ll probably always say that about any book I do!

Here are some photos of the finished book:

Stay tuned for part 2 for my second entry for Kindred Spirits!

Until next time,