Wednesday 6th August saw us back in the wonderful Café 19 at Newcastle Cathedral for our annual get together and our Summer book swap on the theme of 'Wordplay' - a lovely opportunity to catch up with each other, see the books 'for real' and eat delicious cake!
Although several of our number were unable to join us, we still had a range of lovely books to swap and, as always, people had interpreted the theme in a variety of creative and interesting ways.
Judi had taken Shakespeare's insults as her inspiration, creating a calligraphed interactive insult generator with a piano hinge binding:
Jo's flag book contained no words at all, but a series of 'emoji' phrases linked to the word stem 'play':
Margaret's book comprised of a series of tiny books containing examples of word-play, nestled into a segmented folder, decorated with some experimental watercolour mark-making:
Pat's book used photos from her garden, accompanied by some of her 'invented' collective noun phrases:
Karenna's Washi tape double signature journal provided constructional inspiration and blank pages to personalise:
Janet B's intricately-folded Snake book in a box was inspired by the work of Sunderland book artist Ellie Clewlow and made from re-purposed dictionary pages, accompanied by an extra edition of the famous gameshow 'Call my Bluff':
As well as catching up on each other's news, swapping books and eating cake, we all helped Judi and Karenna with their de-stashing endeavours, by relieving them of some of their leather and fabric. Judi has already used the lovely 'fish' fabric she chose, with some creative input from Margaret! We look forward to seeing more future makes with goodies we took away!
Our next meeting will be back on Zoom on Saturday 25th October. This year we've decided to suggest a theme and a structure option for each swap so our Autumn theme is 'Circles and Squares' and the structure option is 'A Fabric Book'. We look forward to seeing everyone then!
