Lauren Forrester: Book of 100.

Right this is a back dated post, but one I have only just noticed was missing from my blog! Oops.
Basically, here we have photos of mock ups, the final resolution and a general and pretty brief explanation as to how i arrived at it.
Enjoy...

Mock up 1:
This was my first attempt at Japanese stab binding, which was reasonably straight forward, the main aim was to test out the woodwork facilities down stairs, which I have to say are really well equipped, thanks Rodger for helping me make this one!
The cover is made from a 3 ply oak veneer that I glued and pressed over night. I cut it to shape, including a simple fabric hinge on the front cover, and clamped the whole lot together ready for binding.
I then took the whole thing back down to woodwork, measured and drilled the holes, and then... I stuck the whole thing on the industrial sander to get a really clean finish on the edges ( since the pages were all hand cut it was really uneven!)

I kept it all clamped up, so the binding was really secure and accurate.
Take a look...

Mock up 2:
This mock up was an experimentation into the possibilities of the content...
100 trees was never going to be interesting unless I did something really stunning, this was going to come in the form of 100 cut out trees, getting smaller and smaller untill the shape became an acorn! over 100 pages the effect would be a really thick, hollow inprint of a trees lifespan. Anyway I was concerned about how long this would take to hand cut, so i saught other way in which to cut the pages.
I found the laser cutter.

(apologies for the orintation of theses photos, It's not that I can't get the to rotate, I just cant be bothered to find out why they won't)

Final Resolution:
Went horribly wrong.
Bad time management along with the laser cutter being unavalible when I needed it, meant I couldn't go ahead with the cut out pages idea, and with less than a week to go I was starting to doubt whether or not i'd be able to get the book completed!
After alot of confusion and upset over my first plan going wrong, i finally got it together and went ahead with an idea based on layering tracing paper. The tracing paper was printed greyscale with my orginal photos, most of them had been digitally manipulated though.
The idea would have worked okay if I had managed to get the book bound to a reasonable quality, which I feel I did not. The binding is awful, really loose, which is a huge shame consdiering the amount of time I spend on the cover. Anyway take a look for yourself. I'd give it a 6/10 at the most.