This was inspired by Russian Dresses and Ten Dresses – particularly the way they looked when fanned from one site.
This is six signatures, 14 x 17cm.
Each signature encloses a 5mm concertina, which holds essentially a single flag book with 5 – 7 dresses on it. The dresses are grouped to one side of the concertina, which allows them to line up beautifully.
The dresses are all cricut cut, and it was originally my plan to have 7 dresses in every signature, but somehow that didn’t happen! Given that I treat every book as a maquette I’m OK with that, and it will maybe be corrected in my next iteration (currently in plan!).
I selected the backing papers for each signature to firstly work with the colours of the dresses, and then when i found the red ribbon to use as a closure that worked too!
Most of my books are assembled as the need arises, so when it does work i’m delighted. The buttons I began adding because i needed something to add to the ribbon as i secured it. I was already thinking about the fact that the bottoms of each signature was so much thicker than the top. When I had the idea to add the buttons (held in with Selleys Fix and Go Multi Grip, because PVA wouldn’t hold it).
So I like this and I think I can take it further. Here are some of my ideas:
- make each signature a room, and put furniture in them
- windows between the signatures?
- instead of dresses: buildings, merry go round, furniture
- narrower? there’s so much space from the dress to the edge right now
- something along the top, like a merry-go-round?)
- make a merry go round – with horses or animals or such.
My next step – I’m going to use a portrait I did of my ex-husband James and repurpose it into a book like this. It’s not appropriate to have it in my home (I don’t believe I even hung it when we were together). I’m going to repurpose it for the backgrounds, and my current plan is to do some houses (because Houses!). I’ll keep it the same size.
Here are some other things I want to remember about this book.
- the spines of each signature I added a nice beige-ish thing to hinge them: the little bits of text are also quite pleasing
- This time instead of gluing signatures back-to-back I could cover them together, basically with this one the signatures are not totally properly glued
- I could make a hole with the cricut for the ribbon (this one I made a slot and threaded the ribbon through)
