This past summer, Emily, back home from her first year at college, found herself a new creative outlet: binding books. These are all gifts for friends. She had an idea of their respective favorite books and set about procuring used paperback versions, taking off their covers and making new ones with fabric and hard paperboard. She designed the new covers on her computer and printed them on vinyl using her Silhouette machine. Then followed heat-pressing, gluing and setting between clamped wooden boards, and painting.
This was her first book.
The page edges are painted grey at the top of the book, blending into red at the bottom,
after which were added six black crows.
Since this is a duology,
|
©2024 Emily Teigland |
here is the other book.
|
©2024 Emily Teigland |
Its page edges are painted in reverse, with five crows. If you've read the series, you might know why.
|
©2024 Emily Teigland |
Emily made this set next for a friend who, in addition to enjoying Austen, also loves plants.
She found these endpapers online.
Here are the back covers, with quotes from each book.
This is the next set,
|
©2024 Emily Teigland
|
also a duology. Emily used metallic /pearlescent vinyl for these.
I love the intricacy of the vinylwork!
|
©2024 Emily Teigland
|
Once again, painted page edges,
quotes on the back,
|
©2024 Emily Teigland |
And gorgeous endpapers.
|
©2024 Emily Teigland |
Thank you all for reaching out to comment and email me after my last post. I was thrilled and surprised to hear from so many of you, and very encouraged that you're still reading my blog! I have no plans to stop blogging, and I promise that I will post whenever I can. So much happens in our home and family from day to day, and yet very little of it can be reasonably turned into a post in the same way that adventures of toddlers or elementary schoolkids with cardboard swords and bunnies and egg-laying chickens could. For so many years, ikatbag has been a record of not just my projects but also the creative things we've done as a family. So many of our projects, for instance, were inspired by watching my girls in their various play scenarios. Each had a story, was a story - stories even I've forgotten - of princesses and fairies, detectives and world-savers, blossoming entrepreneurs and fearless outside-the-box-ers, of our literal and metaphorical journeys to explore the great outdoors, museums and organized playspaces, as well as the limitless creativity of a child's mind. These adventures were how we stewarded our time, of which we seemed to have a lot then, although it seems just a blink now. "Mum, I'm bored, what shall we do today?" was the soundtrack that seemed to play on loop, and out of that boredom came manic creative lunacy. I love how those early posts so easily allow me to revisit those long-ago days.
My girls are older now, and other things have fallen into place in their schedules: school, band, sports, friends, travel. Their interests have expanded way beyond what I've tried to nurture as director of creative operations. And they're sharing their own photos on social media, and choosing their own ways to tell their stories. So this space seems a little quieter now that it's mostly just me making stuff. Oddly, it's not anywhere as sad as I thought it might be. Every now and then someone will bring a group of friends over to make posters, or friendship bracelets or - in a throwback to those halcyon summers of middle school - slime. And creativity has begun taking different forms than art-and-craft, too. Whenever Jenna bakes, for instance, it's artistic expression as much as it is therapy or nourishment. And there's music, too - all three girls love being in their various instrumental and vocal ensembles, and that's hard to capture in a photo, or in words.
And so I thought I'd post Emily's most recent project here today. Not only because it's fun to see, but also because it's fitting - this blog after all, is an archive of what fearless and unbridled creating looks like in our home, and all the accompanying stories of product and process. Sometimes I'm still part of it, and sometimes not. I still get a huge rush to say, "Look what gorgeous thing got made here today!" I'm so happy that you guys are still stopping by to visit, and get to see it.
Speaking of visits and process, I am happy to report that I have FINALLY fixed the https thingy on my blog. The whole thing was surprisingly fraught, actually. I can't remember when all this surfaced but suddenly, some years ago, as a result of some Google update, websites had to switch from http to https to up their security. Now, increased security is always good, especially against hacking and other unauthorized access, plus there were instructions all over the internet promising how easy it was to do it for your particular blog platform. And to an extent, that last bit was true: I got my family blog (a dinosaur of a thing on Blogger) fixed in, like 30 seconds. Then I tried to do the same for ikatbag.
Total failure; nothing worked. Instead: all manner of restrictions, roadblocks and error messages like You Do Not Have Authority! I eventually realized that it was my custom domain that was complicating things. Numerous forums and hours spent contacting custom-domain-third-party-sellers later, I was no further along. Then I succumbed to my grief funk - or maybe it was the wretched pandemic, I don't remember; it was all one big unhappy party - and UnSafe Blog! got punted to the bottom of my priority list. I rationalized it thus: I wasn't selling stuff directly off my blog and thus not collecting credit card numbers or anything like that, so it would temporarily be semi-OK to leave it as is while I tried to get my life back on track. Still, the thought gnawed at me that people might be leery of visiting ikatbag because of the doomsday messages greeting them each time they loaded the homepage: Unclean! Suspicious Site! Flee To Safety! And so, every now and then, I'd muster the energy to try a different forum, or re-contact some technological help desk that a search engine had newly unearthed.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I got a hot lead. Someone sent me a long, long list of complicated instructions that the husband and I pored over (and he's a software engineer, so that's saying something) in the course of several days. We followed those instructions to a T, and as it seemed to be proceeding in a meaningful direction for once, we tried to have faith, taking breaks whenever our brains hurt, which was often. There came one horrifying moment toward the end when ikatbag inexplicably and chillingly disappeared off the internet, heralded by yet another fun error message claiming I, the owner, had closed the connection. What connection? What did it mean, closed? I swear my soul left my body and floated in the ether, screaming that its imbecilic owner had somehow deleted its own blog forever, while all the other disembodied soul-victims of virtual scams jeered and hissed I Told You Sos.
Miraculously, my blog reappeared some time later, and the https thing was somehow magically in place, and everything was gloriously secure and I stopped pulling my hair out and stared at the screen and was like, What Just Happened. It was scary stuff. Let me tell you, friends, technology is a giant people-eating monster.
BUT! I am relieved and glad to say that ikatbag is once again benign and welcoming to all and sundry. Thank you to everyone who endured the sinister warnings and continued to come read my tutorials and ramblings regardless. It may have taken literally years to sort it out, but it's now all good. So spread the word! Invite new friends and the previously-leery! How wonderful to move forward at last!
Until next time,