What Was I Thinking?

I was thinking books and pages and bindings and I should have been thinking engineering.  This turned out so much harder than I imagined it would, but here is my progress report: 1) the hard drive book is still in my head 2) the camera book is still in my head 3) the pear has been cut, gessoed and badly hinged so I cannot go farther until I solve the hinge (I can't count a book that can't be safely handled!) 4) the Starbucks ATC book will be finished tomorrow, it has changed to a clear venti cup 5) the teapot lid is finished.

So for now, let us talk about the teapot lid.  I cut a pattern for the base of the lid and covered both sides with cut down teabag boxes while attaching it to the pottery with a linen framing tape hinge and inserting the end of the accordion book pages.  At this point I realized that everything revolved around the hinge, and what I had was not going to be sufficient.  For one thing, it wanted to pull off of the pottery, for another, it didn't want to close flat.  Amazingly, I found some old book tape (I have no idea where it even came from) that matched the painted rim of the lid so I made a narrow tape hinge that works very well. 

I took the tag end of several tea bags and made a small tassel to attach to the handle.  Not incidentally, all the bags and boxes used have an English connection: Yorkshire, Chelsea, Harrods, etc.



This is the bottom and you can see the tassel and the tape hinge on the left side.



It is anybody's guess where this book begins, but when you open it this is what you see.  I glued some tea bags into the lid and attached the end page with the quote with a bit of folded tape.  Right now, it smells delightfully of tea when you open it, but I know that won't last.

When you open the book it sits nicely on its own thanks to the handle on the lid and you can flip through the pages very easily.  I filled the pages with empty tea bag packets and added a quote at the end: The pleasures of afternoon tea run like a trickle of honey through English literature from Rupert Brooke's wistful lines on the Old Vicarage at Grantchester to Miss Marple, calmly dissecting a case over tea cakes at a seaside hotel.  - Stan Hey  I have used all of the well known quotes about the pleasures of tea for one project or another and so chose one less well known with a book reference.

It sounds pretty simple as I describe the process - it was anything but.  Each step had to be thought out carefully, looking ahead and anticipating the next step.  With the exception of folding paper to make the pages, it was all a matter of drawing on past experiences and crossing my fingers.  Thank God for gel medium!