Making Sketchbooks and Folders
With Sarah Grace Dye, Caroline Ross, and Suzi Banks- Buam
From concertina sketchbooks and long-form journals to folders and creative structures made from leftover and found papers. We’ll share the elements from which countless unique creations can emerge, exploring favourite techniques used by artists and makers to house and collate their work.
You’ll learn how to combine folds, sections, pockets, enclosures and sewn elements to create books that are both practical and personal. We’ll explore different sizes, papers and approaches, incorporating handmade, naturally dyed and printed papers, repurposed materials, and ways of making use of paper scraps and other creative waste.
We’ll also look at practical bookmaking elements, including choosing appropriate glues, tapes and tools, and discovering simple alternatives to specialist equipment.
Whether you want to make a foraging journal, an artist’s sketchbook, a place for daily creative practice, or a treasured home for your collection of paper ephemera, this course is an invitation to experiment, and create the forms that best fit your creative practice.
No previous experience is needed.
4 Live Online Sessions
Access 8 hours of teaching (live & recorded)
4 Printable Handouts
Access to recordings until September 2028
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Concertina Sketchbooks and Folded Journals
With Caroline Ross
An Introduction to the folding and combining skills that can launch a thousand future book ideas. These quickly assembled books are a favourite for journals, sketchbooks, and more. Methods, sizes and materials, adding sections, offshoots, pockets, sewn elements and more. Working with things we can find, forage, repurpose or purchase.
Tuesday 1st September 4-6pm GMT
With Caroline Ross
An Introduction to the folding and combining skills that can launch a thousand future book ideas. These quickly assembled books are a favourite for journals, sketchbooks, and more. Methods, sizes and materials, adding sections, offshoots, pockets, sewn elements and more. Working with things we can find, forage, repurpose or purchase.
Tuesday 1st September 4-6pm GMT
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Diagonal Folder as Medicine Book
With Suzi Banks Buam
Fold a large Diagonal Folder into which we will build a 2-signature text block, all devised to employ your beautiful papers to concoct a simple form. We will use large sheets of paper to make a specimen book for color experiments or a journal for your daily creative practice.
Wednesday 8th September 4-6pm GMT
With Suzi Banks Buam
Fold a large Diagonal Folder into which we will build a 2-signature text block, all devised to employ your beautiful papers to concoct a simple form. We will use large sheets of paper to make a specimen book for color experiments or a journal for your daily creative practice.
Wednesday 8th September 4-6pm GMT
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Simple Sketchbooks
With Sarah Grace Dye
Sketchbooks are a necessity for almost anyone who creates in whatever way that may be. Learn some simple stitch techniques so you can create your own sketchbooks specifically suited to you and your practice. We will explore pamphlet stitch, saddle stitch and Japanese stab bound book structures and the different papers that suit each one. We will also look at some options for covers from decorative through to a harder backed sketchbook.
Wednesday 15th September 4-6pm GMT
With Sarah Grace Dye
Sketchbooks are a necessity for almost anyone who creates in whatever way that may be. Learn some simple stitch techniques so you can create your own sketchbooks specifically suited to you and your practice. We will explore pamphlet stitch, saddle stitch and Japanese stab bound book structures and the different papers that suit each one. We will also look at some options for covers from decorative through to a harder backed sketchbook.
Wednesday 15th September 4-6pm GMT
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Experimental Sketchbooks - With Waste Materials
With Sarah Grace Dye
We all throw away so much paper and card in our daily lives, have you ever considered that it could be a useful resource? We will look at some of that waste and learn interesting ways to use it to create sketchbooks. Utilising some of the stitching techniques from the previous session we will discover a number of ways to create unique, useful and beautiful things. After this session you will not look at your household waste the same again!
Wednesday 29th September 4-6pm GMT
With Sarah Grace Dye
We all throw away so much paper and card in our daily lives, have you ever considered that it could be a useful resource? We will look at some of that waste and learn interesting ways to use it to create sketchbooks. Utilising some of the stitching techniques from the previous session we will discover a number of ways to create unique, useful and beautiful things. After this session you will not look at your household waste the same again!
Wednesday 29th September 4-6pm GMT
CONTRUBUTORS
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Sarah Grace Dye
Sarah Grace Dye is a visual artist who loves to find a use for and beauty in the ephemera of the everyday. Working with these objects has become like an alchemic practice enabling a transformation to take place. She believes learning to use the materials that surround us is important and her ethos dictates that it is important to waste nothing, that everything has a purpose and unique attributes to be examined, explored, elevated and a new purpose discovered. In essence, to search out beauty and hope in everything. The resulting alchemic objects are to be celebrated, shared and treasured.
Sarah is a collector and uses papermaking, natural dye and ink making, drawing, cyanotype, stitch and origami to create work, often within book structures, that amalgamates these together to produce small and perfectly formed keepsakes that echo the essence of the materials and story they communicate.
Sarah is a firm believer that everyone has the capacity to be creative and she is keen, wherever possible, to provide the catalyst for that to be realised. Her belief in the freedom to play and discover ones own marks is central and she is constantly developing this area within her own practice.
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Caroline Ross
Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published spring 2025.
Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice. After the rooks have feasted on the riverbank, the empty mussel shells become paint palettes. The seasonally moulted flight feathers of local swans and geese become quill pens and brushes. Chalk dug out from their setts by badgers is left in piles in the woods, where she gathers it and take it home to make gouache.
Caroline makes paints from foraged earth pigments from around the UK, and art tools and inks from natural, wild, and found materials such as oak galls, rusty nails, elderberries, bay leaves and cherry tree gum. The natural fluctuations of materials and the botanical ink stains or ochre paints forming prepared grounds on paper, all suggest forms with which she works.
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Suzi Banks Buam
Suzi Banks Baum is a mother, writer, book artist. She follows the thread of daily creative practice through her visual and literary work. Entirely obsessed with marigolds, Suzi’s pursuit with naturally derived color fuels a desire to reduce plastics in studio practice and draws her into the Berkshire landscape she calls home.
A national workshop leader in the US, Suzi teaches book arts with a focus on technique and a wild array of paper decoration. Suzi created a book arts residency in Gyumri, Armenia where she has taught for 4 years. Her mixed media work appears in Collage Your Life by Melanie Mowinski. Her writing appears in a variety of literary journals, including Open Secrets Magazine online and in the Guild of Book Workers journal. A skilled needleworker, her embroidered Story Cloth is featured in Does It Have Pockets online.