Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
New Layouts
Here are two layout's I quickly made. Added color so they wouldn't be so "scholarly" looking, and tried out the larger type.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
NEXT.
Next: I need to really start thinking about the look of my book. I need to decide who I'm making this book for, and how I want it to look. I might take some photos similar to the photos from the book in class. I also want to look through some books to get ideas for a different layout and how other crafty type of books look.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Shoes Off Hair Down
Some photos my mom took of the show
My nephew Dylan, Me, and my Mom
Dylan, Me and Dad
Show Window
My sister Jen, Me my Grandmother, and Dylan
Erin, Me, Martin, Danni, and Emilee
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Book
I started making a rough outline of my book, just to start trying to place some things and get a feel for what it might look like. This is the start of my extra-illustration page.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Westford Historical Society
Over the weekend I went to my town's historical society to look at some of the scrapbooks they had in storage. They had a few of them for me that the intern brought down.
The first scrapbook I looked at had a red cover that said "photo album" on it. All of the pictures were gone because I think they have them in the museum on display or something so I didn't really spend much time looking through it. It was just full of captions about Trolley Cars.
The second one was from 1949 about the "Tadmuck Club" I know of Tadmuck Road in my town and I believe it was some form of womens club. It had brown pages and was full of newspaper clippings, invitations, and notes.
Another scrapbook I looked at was green with numbered pages and was full of mostly just newspaper articles. There was a lot about wool oil or something...whatever that is. But I did notice that it was one of the Mark Twain scrapbooks.
Then I looked through a huge 3-ring binder full of Westford Academy graduation programs from 1892-1968. It was neat to notice how they gradually change over time. They all said Westford Academy with a picture of the school, a border, "Graduation Exercises," place, date, and time.
That is actually the museum building now.
The last scrapbook I looked at was huge and the paper was falling apart. It was from 1899 and belonged to Lottie Blogett. It had a prayer card in it and small decorative post-card type of things in it. There were lots of images of birds, flowers, and women, and she used flower stickers.
The first scrapbook I looked at had a red cover that said "photo album" on it. All of the pictures were gone because I think they have them in the museum on display or something so I didn't really spend much time looking through it. It was just full of captions about Trolley Cars.
The second one was from 1949 about the "Tadmuck Club" I know of Tadmuck Road in my town and I believe it was some form of womens club. It had brown pages and was full of newspaper clippings, invitations, and notes.
Another scrapbook I looked at was green with numbered pages and was full of mostly just newspaper articles. There was a lot about wool oil or something...whatever that is. But I did notice that it was one of the Mark Twain scrapbooks.
Then I looked through a huge 3-ring binder full of Westford Academy graduation programs from 1892-1968. It was neat to notice how they gradually change over time. They all said Westford Academy with a picture of the school, a border, "Graduation Exercises," place, date, and time.
That is actually the museum building now.The last scrapbook I looked at was huge and the paper was falling apart. It was from 1899 and belonged to Lottie Blogett. It had a prayer card in it and small decorative post-card type of things in it. There were lots of images of birds, flowers, and women, and she used flower stickers.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Here is the text/notes I started writing as content for my book. Definitely need to look at more on Hair Albums.
Extra-Illustration/Grangerizing
Extra-Illustration, or grangerizing is the practice of taking apart books and adding in blank pages for inserting your own extra content, like illustrations, photographs, letters, autographs and so on. It was an 18th century practice that started in England as a way for gentlemen to demonstrate their wealth, ownership, and taste by essentially recreating a book with costly prints. However, anyone who owned a book could be an extra-illustrator. It sprang from James Granger’s Biographical history of England in 1769. His book included lists of portraits that readers actually went and found and included in their own personal copies. “Grangerizing” continued on into other texts and was considered a legitimate way of enjoying books.
Shakespeare became a popular subject in grangerizing because of the many options of materials one could include like portraits of actors, historical figures, characters, and things like playbills. There were also many copies of Shakespeare’s plays that one could use.
Extra-Illustration sometimes was not viewed in a positive way. It had been argued that you should be reading the books for the content, not customizing it for your own enjoyment. However, the extra-illustrations that were added were usually relevant to the text itself, meaning the books were read before they were taken apart. Some were also accused of “breaking up a good book to illustrate a worse one.” (1892 critic?)
Hair Albums
In the 19th century, it was common for young women to exchange locks of their own hair as tokens of friendship and kept them in albums. Similar to a friendship album, girls would include locks of woven hair, paper cutouts, and poems and autographs by their friends and family. In an album by Helen Marion Adams, David and Melinda Bosworth included a hair weaving, two paper hearts and the words, “A small memento left behind recalls an absent friend to mind.”
Hair does not decompose and represents a person and memories of them even when they are gone.
“This lock of hair
I once did wear,
And now do freely give,
That you may see and think of me,
As long as you do live.”
Extra-Illustration/Grangerizing
Extra-Illustration, or grangerizing is the practice of taking apart books and adding in blank pages for inserting your own extra content, like illustrations, photographs, letters, autographs and so on. It was an 18th century practice that started in England as a way for gentlemen to demonstrate their wealth, ownership, and taste by essentially recreating a book with costly prints. However, anyone who owned a book could be an extra-illustrator. It sprang from James Granger’s Biographical history of England in 1769. His book included lists of portraits that readers actually went and found and included in their own personal copies. “Grangerizing” continued on into other texts and was considered a legitimate way of enjoying books.
Shakespeare became a popular subject in grangerizing because of the many options of materials one could include like portraits of actors, historical figures, characters, and things like playbills. There were also many copies of Shakespeare’s plays that one could use.
Extra-Illustration sometimes was not viewed in a positive way. It had been argued that you should be reading the books for the content, not customizing it for your own enjoyment. However, the extra-illustrations that were added were usually relevant to the text itself, meaning the books were read before they were taken apart. Some were also accused of “breaking up a good book to illustrate a worse one.” (1892 critic?)
Hair Albums
In the 19th century, it was common for young women to exchange locks of their own hair as tokens of friendship and kept them in albums. Similar to a friendship album, girls would include locks of woven hair, paper cutouts, and poems and autographs by their friends and family. In an album by Helen Marion Adams, David and Melinda Bosworth included a hair weaving, two paper hearts and the words, “A small memento left behind recalls an absent friend to mind.”
Hair does not decompose and represents a person and memories of them even when they are gone.
“This lock of hair
I once did wear,
And now do freely give,
That you may see and think of me,
As long as you do live.”
Sunday, January 31, 2010
So my game plan right now is:
- Start doing more research on my topics
- Start writing rough drafts for my book
- Continue work on my scrapbooks
- Get a friendship album going this weekend
- Work on some of my own examples of topics in my book
- Call my town's museum and see if they have any scrapbooks or other practices related, then hopefully take pictures of them if I can.
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