Stab-bound book

I finally got round to looking at the book I made last week.  It doesn't look much for 3 days' work, but the real outcome is how much I have learned!

The book has got a front and back cover, two metallic end papers, a title page and an excerpt from a poem on vellum both backed by sparkly paper, and 8 images (contact sheet in extra). It's amazingly difficult and hard work to get an awl through 16 sheets of paper and keep everything perfectly stacked, so my book is a bit wonky.

Then the stitching is an art in itself.  You have to start in the right place and sew in the right sequence so that the thread never doubles over itself - it's a good job we had excellent tutors.

The other 4 photographers went for abstract artistic images, but I decided on B&W Street.  I was inspired by an extract from T S Eliot's "The Waste Land" which was written in a shelter on Margate promenade in 1922:

"On Margate sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing
The broken fingernails of dirty hands
My people humble people who expect
Nothing."

I found myself in a shopping street just as the schools had tipped out and there were lots of "humble" families going about their lives, too busy to notice me observing them.