Emily Has Been Binding Books

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,

The Purple Prom Dress

Happy (late) summer! We had a jam-packed summer break, which I will recount later, but this week, the kids are settled into school (and uni), so I'm catching up on posts and such. Do people still write blogs these days? Or read them? Or is it all just tiktoks and instagram? I feel very behind the times, plodding away here on ikatbag. Maybe I'll try instagram sometime. Apparently I have an account, but I keep forgetting and people have to remind me. It seems rather out of character for me to just post pictures (let alone just one!) and not also write a novella accompanying them. But I get it - times have changed, and maybe people now only have the attention span of a flea, so perhaps byte-sized social media is the way to go.

See - this is what I mean: that first paragraph of nonsense prolog. I don't know if instagram and I can even be friends.

But let's talk about this purple prom dress already.

In May, Jenna went to prom. And needed a dress. The only things certain at the time were that it had to be purple and textured. There was the usual feeble concession of If We Can't Buy It I'll Sew It, which both Jenna and I knew really meant We Won't Be Able To Find What We Want In Stores So Let's Start Drafting Yesterday. I knew it would be work - it usually is, to take an idea in one's head and bring it to life - but experience has shown me that in each instance of handmaking an important garment, nobody regretted having chosen that over ready-to-wear.  And the reasons range from practical (it's a more efficient process than trying to buy - and return!- RTW), to emotional (there are limited school formals left to sew dresses for, sniff). 

Then I caught myself for that "but", as if I had to justify my choice. Let's take a quick tangent here to explain.

Some of you know that I've been in therapy and initially it was because Dad died unexpectedly some years ago and threw me for a loop. Since then it's evolved into an exploration of loss and what it means to be the sole immigrant from my family in this country, plus all the ways I'm becoming whole in the aftermath of both. One of the most useful concepts I've learned, not only through in-person therapy but also from books and podcasts containing the wisdom of others who've had these experiences before me, is the idea of "And also." 

Particularly for a person like myself who's been trained to think analytically and methodically, the idea of "And" initially was weird. We science-y sorts prefer "But". "But" brings with it demarcation and the clarity of contrast, which is important in precision: we define things as much by what they are as what they are not. To become whole after loss, though, involves integration and creation, a building up of parts that have meaning on their own but which are also so much stronger fitting together in congruent ways. 

Hence "And also".

For instance, I've learned that I can be Asian and also embrace Western American values, that I have robust family and friend support networks in Singapore and also in Minnesota, that I can have lost a parent and also have an emotionally denser and authentically meaningful relationship with the remaining parent, that my teenagers can be independent and also excited about close ties to their family.

And as those teenagers grow out of the house, hurtle toward graduation and becoming newer and fuller people through their college years, I can be sad about how fast those the child years have disappeared and also be 100% unafraid to experience all the manic milestones of both senior year HS and freshman college year: auditions, concerts, football games, swim meets, homecoming, prom, apartment move-ins, apartment move-outs, summer jobs, clothes acquiring and clothes donating. And also be excited about their future decisions and adventures. And also be apprehensive. And also ignorant. Bewildered. Confident. Thankful. Proud.  

Because we never know what the future will bring - and how it might even surprise us by its providence. 

Like that one day this past summer when Emily wanted to sew shorts. And we went shopping and drafted (traced from an old pair she loved, actually), and she made herself these: 

Did I see that coming during her senior year as she was packing up her stuff in her car and driving away to her new apartment? I did not. Could I have visualized her bringing that same stuff back to this house less than a year later, then spending the next three months just hanging out here with the cats, completing once more our table of five, working two (very fun and very in-character) jobs, as well as several craft fairs I got to help with, as if that move to college never happened, except it did, because she was now so much more poised and serene, and also deeper and brighter and braver? I couldn't have - my Graduation-Day brain, wallowing in the emotions of loss, had ultralow expectations; it certainly did not have the bandwidth to imagine that this change could be good, let alone this good. 

Fast forward to a year later, to Jenna and her dress. And to me weighing the pros and cons of Sewing vs Buying. I finally decided there didn't need to be a But, wherein I rationalized Why Homemade Was Ultimately Worth It. Instead, I thought, "Yes, it would be lunacy. And also I want to do it." No justification needed.

And that's where we are today - taking you through the process of this dress coming together. Because if you thought Emily's green prom dress was a lot of work (and I did, too, at the time), that definition was about to be completely revised with Jenna's purple one. 

First, as I'd mentioned earlier, was simply the framework that it had to be purple and textured. So we went shopping for fabric, and found this sheer lace with floral motifs along one edge. Right away, looking at it, we knew it would be the border detail for the skirt hem.

Then we found lavender satin for the underlay. The sheer layer on top provided the texture we were looking for.

Second came the sketch. This was the prototype. Jenna quickly vetoed the double straps and we simplified the design to single cross-straps.

Then I drafted the block and pattern. Each piece of the initial outer dress was two-layered: the satin with the sheer lace. The skirt had to be cut out first, to place and reserve the embroidered border design. The remaining clear sheer section was then used for the bodice.

Here are those two layers basted together. My mother had been right about hand-basting all this while: that it is indeed superior to pins, particularly in garment making. I remember teen LiEr hissing and grumbling each time I was made to hand-baste, begging instead to be allowed to just use pins, or press lines with the iron, or anything else, really, as a faster alternative. Hilariously and ironically, these days, I find myself choosing to hand-baste at the slightest opportunity. Oh, the wisdom of hindsight - and of those who knew better. 

Here's the bodice, with its still-visible hand-basted CF seam.

Up to this point, I did not consider this Work - the design was pretty straightforward, the pieces came together quickly and the fabric wasn't especially fiddly to work with. It took maybe a day, day and a half. After this, though, came the circus. Here is a shot of the plain bodice - the plan was to cut out lace motifs and stitch them onto the bodice to create texture that would complement the edge design on the skirt hem. I reminded myself that as I'd done something similar for Emily's green prom dress, this would be more of the same. I forgot, however, that with the green prom dress, the bodice was covered by whole lace fabric, with just additional motifs sewn onto the skirt and back. This purple dress was quite the opposite in that I had to create that whole-lace look myself.

Here is a shot of that bodice in progress. Each bit of lace had to be handstitched onto the main dress (and hand-basted before that!)

It was, as my kids say, sooooo extra. And naturally it ended up being a last-minute thing, although not from procrastinating; it simply just took this long. I sewed all day the day before prom, then on the morning of, I sat at my sewing table and stitched 6 hours non-stop. 

When Jenna's friends came over in their dresses to do their hair and makeup together, I was still sewing. 

And when we got to the park for the photoshoot, I was still pulling basting stitches out of the bodice. While the cameras were rolling, yes.

Which explains why there are many shots of the dress on Fleur, my mannequin, and not so many on Jenna, because there was no time to do a posed photoshoot of her in it before she threw it on and raced to the park to take photos with her friends. It was only days after prom that I put the dress on Fleur and got most of these pictures.

Here's the back.

And here is the full frontal shot

the bodice,

and that skirt hem.

That crazy embroidery wraps around the side

and to the back.

This is the full back view.

A couple of the very few full front solo shots of Jenna and one side-ish one.

One of her corsage, which Emily made

and one of her with Kate, who came to the photoshoot for "moral support and comedic relief", in her words.

More posts coming up soon. One is a project Emily has been working on, and another is an update on stuffed toys and such. And also I have thoughts to share on sending a first kid off to uni. See you again soon!