Best Class Ever!!!!

Hi everyone, just finished my summer school. It was absolutely the most insane thing that I think I have ever done (school-wise that is). So it was a printmaking / bookmaking course and we crammed 16 weeks of classes into 3 weeks. My days at school were 7 hours long, and I would come home and continue working until I couldn't stay awake, then get up the next day and start all over again. The class was 5 days a week, but we had to work 7 days a week to keep up with the homework. It reminded me alot of woking the Gem Show, except somehow I managed not to get deathly sick. Despite the intenseness, it turned out to be one of my favorite classes ever. My instructor (a grad student named Nate) was awesome and let me incorporate my crazy, untraditional bookmaking ideas into my projects. I ended up making a zillion prints (dry etchings and xerox transfers), and total of 3 dummy books (little traditionally bound blank books) and 3 artist books. I am posting images of two of them, but my third one was only about an inch by an inch big, so it did not photograph well. It's unfortunate, because it is really cool and inside it is a poem I wrote about being ant like, and feeling small and out of place in the world, while also trying to maintain individuality. It looks like a miniature hardbound book (has a white cloth cover), with a small ant (plastic, not real) ant attached to the front cover. I wrote all of the text in the drypoint method on plexi-glass, which means it was all scratched into the plexi by hand (it was super tiny writing I might add), and I had to write every thing in reverse. Crazy stuff! So, hopefully this fall I can replace my stupid camera that broke and get a photo of it up. I borrowed a camera to take the other photos, so here they are! Enjoy!

Oh, the quilt looking one is a book, it actually folds up into a book form, but hangs for display. The other one is actually cast from beeswax (which is not advisable on a warm day, as it attracts every bee in the neighborhood), and then bound like a book.