The Pink Book (and It’s Companions)

Book, Hand-Made Paper

Hand-made paper made using Japanese paper making techniques and sewn into books.

I spent a lot of time making hand-made paper using Japanese tree fibers and techniques which I found to be a very meditative and methodical process. I thought a good way to display my efforts would be in a book which invites the meditative action of flipping through it. As a graphic designer, I’ve made a lot of books where I focused on the design of the visual elements, typography, and content. With this project, I was very interested in the idea of the paper itself being the content.

With The Pink Book, I wanted to play with dyeing fiber. I used two natural dyes, one made from walnut and one made from avocado which I mixed with fibers dyed pink from a red synthetic dye. I used the walnut dye on gampi fiber, the avocado on mitsumata fiber, and the red dye on kozo fiber. When making the paper, I knew that I wanted there to be a gradient effect so that as you flipped through the pages it slowly became suffused with color and then slowly lost it again. I did this by slowly adding a bit of each dyed fiber as I made sheets of paper.

With It’s Companions, I was focusing more on size and thickness of paper. Using kozo fiber, I experimented with hand beating fiber and using a Japanese Naginata Beater to create different textures and thickness of paper.