I've Been REALLY Busy

So the hardest part of this project, in many ways, was coming up with the content. I knew I wanted to do a star book (more on that later). It's a gift book for a librarian, so I fairly quickly settled on children's books as a theme. But it took an hour on the phone with my mother before she came up with the idea of featuring Caldecott Medal books. The board is covered with an embossed paper I bought in Amsterdam a few years ago. I printed the title on vellum, sized to fit the bookplate. The brads are through holes in the board so it's well attached, but I also stuck some glue dots behind the metal just to make sure.

This is a star book (you'll see why in a minute). There are three layers of pages, the front layer has a window cut out, the second layer has a picture of a book (I just printed pictures from the internet on photo paper). The third layer is just blank.

Another view. I just selected 10 books from the history of the award (roughly one every decade), and the years are hand-written.

And now you can see why it's called a star book. It's meant to be displayed like this or you can close it up and tie it shut.

An even more starry view.

I didn't realize the end pieces would be so tight to the cover or I wouldn't have spent so much time on them. It's a list of all the Caldecott Medal books, years and illustrators, and the quote is printed on vellum, mounted behind the window cut out of the first layer, and there's a piece of decorative paper glued behind on the second layer.

Ditto for the endplate of the book. Plus a lovely Ray Bradbury quote. But its so tight you can hardly open it, which wasn't obvious before I glued it to the cover. Oh well, now I know for next time.

They both loved their books, by the way. Gushingly. It was a little embarrassing - making the books was fiddly but not HARD in the way that painting or drawing is.