This virtual gallery represents a year of making in the Blue Preschool. Â From the making of paper to the crafting of narrative, we broke the art of making books apart and studied each piece. Â Fiber, ink, adhesives, needle and thread, scissors, letters, numbers and stories were our materials. Our methods were diverse.
There are many, many ways to bind loose pages into a book. Some of our tried and true favorites were the origami or folded-sheet mini book, the concertina or accordion book, and the quick-and-dirty staple and binder ring methods. Â These techniques were ideal for our book artists, as they could be done independently by preschoolers once learned.
Narrative storytelling comes naturally to preschoolers, and constitutes the bulk of the content of our collection. Â We also collaborated on a series of books exploring ideas of beauty and aesthetic value, called Beautiful Things. Â We contributed ideas over time by having present in the classroom a Beautiful Things Jar, with a slit for inserting your ideas on scraps of paper. We also spent some afternoons in Beautiful Things Research, searching the books in our library for beautiful things and writing our findings on wraps for the jar. These two methods (self-generated and referential) contributed obviously different types of content.
Something Beautiful Book
All photographs by Rebecca Mack. Please use with permission only (contact flyinghenstudio@gmail.com) and give photographer credit. Thank you.