Ayako Hatta's Works

I am so proud, Ayako Hatta is one of my bookmaking students. We meet once a week for only an hour during our lunch break. The three of them Ayako, Kumi and Dennis started handmade books from scratch. Being a quilter and stitcher I can't help but incorporate embroidery and quilting into my books. Dennis was the first to ask if I could show him how to do embroidery. I showed them the basic stitches such as blanket stitch, cross stitch, stem stitch and French knots.

We have been together for over a year and to see what they can make now is amazing. They are all creative in their own way. Ayako created these two wedding journals for her sister's wedding. She embroided their initials on each of the journals and surrounded the initials with embroidery designs. After that, she bound them both into journals using stab stitch technique.

Here is Ayako adminring her own creative work. She is so pleased of how they turned out.

The closed up view of both journals. The cloth she used came from Reverse Art Truck in Ringwood, Melbourne.

Ayako's intention is to get each of the Bride and Groom's family and friends to sign each journal. Ayako thanked everyone in the group who had given both verbal and physical help such as stitching the leather corners and drilling the holes. She said that these journals were really a group effort, but of course it was totally Ayako's original idea. Congratulations Ayako, you made me proud...!

Combo Book

I like giving my students challenges to work on. Challenges are great to get them thinking outside of the square. I give them a brief outline of the projects and get them to think of what to do and what materials to use. It was quite a while ago that we were all making combo books. I gave each of them printed cardboard to use as covers, and we used all types of recycled materials that we have on hand as the signatures (pages). The results were very amazing.

This is my combo book. I fished out the printed cardboard from a recycled paper bin. You might have read somewhere on here that I like printed cardboard, so naturally I always spot it in the recycled bin. This one is very colourful and not damaged. I added a few bits of hand torn paper onto the cover as decoration.

You can see what I used for the signatures. I used some recycled envelopes, office mail envelopes, handmade paper, pages from old magazines, bubble wrap plastic and the pink paper that was an office folder. Of course everyone else's books look totally different from mine. I hope you enjoy looking at my one-of-a-kind combo book.