A Book is like a Garden in the Pocket (1997), like the box, was made by adapting the same Japanese card structure. I wanted to reflect geometrical parterre gardens, also a product of ideas and ingenuity, so it was appropriate to use the square and semicircle pattern as a starting point.
Back then I was very keen to use the materials of illuminated manuscripts, and in this case I used calfskin vellum for the 'pages' and made the drawings with a dip pen and gouache.
My starting point was again the same square and circle pattern.
I cut two squares and three semi circles out of book board.
The vellum pages were cut slightly smaller and the spine piece in my case was about 1 cm thick.
Because of the thickness of the book board when the three semicircles are folded on top of one another, you need to leave a gap between the square and semicircle pieces before assembling the structure, so it sits well when the semicircular pieces are folded in.
I first glued the vellum spine along its edges to the outer side of both squares.
The joins and edges were all covered in Japanese paper and the vellum pages containing the drawings
were glued onto the book in the appropriate places.
I do a lot of work with circles and use a compass cutter which can cut circles up to 15 cm. in diameter but I also sometimes just use my favourite tool, my Fiskars scissors.
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