Friday at last!

Heeeeeeey guys.  Oh man, I am BEAT.  And very ready for a little weekend breaky-break.  Here are some pictures of some things I have been doing:

Here is fake-Pelham with all his gold tooling done. 

Here is a picture of a pretty front yard I walk by every day.  I've never been in Telluride so late in the season, so all the pretty flowers are a fun surprise.

These are the giant poppies in the yard down the road.  I...I like them.

Here is Main Street.  Apparently next up is a Wild West Fest?  I do not yet know what that entails but I hope it is awesome. 

Here is my sample of doign leather in-lay.  It is what all the fancy people do when they do fancy design bindings.  Turns out it is very simple--you cut out whatever shape you want in the main piece, and then in the piece you7 are replacing it with, and you um just put it right in there. The only tricky thing is cutting EXACTLY perfectly, TWO TIMES IN A ROW, or else it doesn't fit right and it looks gross. 

This is my calf-skin plaquette.  This style of fanci-tude is called a Cambridge Panel.  You can't really see it with the annoying flash in this picture, but anyway the outer and inner rectangles are flecked with paint so they are different colors, and then you go back and make the lines and put on decorative stamps in the corners and whatever.  I did this sample I think on Wednesday?  Today I started doing it on my real calf book...with limited success....

Oh brother, this is what I tried doing with real gold leaf, as opposed to the gold foil we usually use which is fake gold and super easy to apply.  Gold leaf is 23 karats, and it totally SUCKS.  The picture below is of the special Gold Cushion where you put the little square of gold leaf, which, by the way, is THINNER THAN A WAVE OF LIGHT, and IMPOSSIBLE TO DEAL WITH.  Of course when Don demos it he makes it work like a dream, settling perfectly on the cushion, cutting it in perfect thin lines with his gold knife and whatever.  Then when I do it it is a crumpled messon that I try to hack into usable pieces, and then yeah it all just tanks.  When you do gold foil all you do is stick the sheet of foil under your tool and press down and voile, there you have it.  But with gold leaf you have to paint the leather with stuff to make the leaf stick and then paint your tool with vaseline to make the leaf stick and then get it to go from the sticky vaseline to the sticky stuff on the leather and ....yeah, basically it is the devil and I plan on never doing it again. 

Yeah so see how the little decorative flourish things are all black and gross looking?  That's because gold leaf is the devil.

Phew, new topic!  Here is Pelham-for-realsies, getting his spine lines all golded up! 

Here's Pelham's front cover, with his gold line like I did on the practice plaquette.  This is the first thing I've done this week that I am almost unreservedly proud of.  Those likes are SOLID, yo. 

This is how everything gets set up to do those lines on the cover.  There is felt on the bottom to cushion the book, then the book with white card in the front cover so things don't get screwed up when I push like crazy on the fillet to make the line solid.  Then there is some blue tape to mask off the margins, and the edge of the gold foil itself, and then The Gizmo, which is what Don calls this fabulous creation that helps you to cheat and get straight lines--it is just some mylar and binder's board that helps you see the line you are trying to toll over and get yourself all straight and together.  Then on top there is a weight so that you don't jigger the Gizmo around after you have it all lined up accurately.  Speaking of 'accurately,' that is one of my favorite words to hear Don say.  He pronounces it more like "AK-rit-ly," which I think we can all agree is delightful.  He has some really great speech idiosyncrasies--I think my favorite is one that happens more often than you would think, based on his love of the word 'invariably.'  He says 'invariably' ALL the TIME. Like, "The type is invariably out of order' or 'Beginners invariably have a hard time with gold leaf.' But what is AWESOME is when he's talking about things that are not always one way or another, and he ends up saying "Invariably it varies."  No joke, I have heard him say this at least three times.  ...Crap is this another time I have used a lot of words to say something that is only interesting and funny in my own brain?  Be honest.  I can take it.

Well well well.  I left the studio early today after screwing up some stuff on my calf book. I may go in tonight or this weekend to fix it....or I might just forget about it.   Calf will keep, my children.  The calf will keep.