Origami books

I saw some lovely pictures of crown binding origami books, but try as I might, I couldn't find instructions on how to do it. I did find instructions on how to make a blizzard book, though, and with some experimenting, I managed to work out how to do it! So after work today, I made these two little books as a test.
 

The little one is made of braille paper. The covers for both books are made from the endpapers of an old children's book about castles, and the inserts for both are from a book about badminton from 1972. 
 

The larger one's insert is made from the pages of the castle book, so there is a little bit of illustration and words. You can see the origami mechanism in the next picture.

The pages can all be removed to be written or drawn on, each one is held in by two folded triangles. So you just need to lift one of them up...

And presto! The page pops out. I think using a thicker card to make the insert would mean that you could store more than one page in each of the section. I will try this out.

I quite like the edges of the pages being torn, it gives it a nice homemade feel. They don't take too long to make, are great for using up bits of random paper that you might have in your stash, and they're cute too. Kind of a Victorian feel to them, not sure why. maybe it's because Victorians liked giving each other little folded love letters and stuff. I want to make a load of these - I'm currently building my stock of sellable things back up. I let my online shop on Folksy run out (the main reason was the way it was rapidly becoming more like Etsy, i.e. full of shit glued to other shit, those bloody octopus things, and necklaces of an Eiffel tower charm with a heart - meh), but I'm building up stock so I can have a little stall again. There's a few places in Cardiff that you can have a stall, I just need to make sure I have plenty of stuff to sell first.

Podcast 7.0

A piece of soundart I have made to commemorate and celebrate the joining together of two fantastic organisations: RNIB Cymru (Royal National Institute of Blind People) and CIB (Cardiff Institute for the Blind).
I have again used braille as the focus of the work, but this time I have used the bilingual strapline of both organisations: RNIB Cymru and CIB working together to support blind and partially sighted people / RNIB Cymru a CIB yn gweithio gyda'n gilydd i gefnogi pobl ddall ac â golwg rhannol.
I allocated each dot of the Braille cell a different note of a version of the pentatonic scale, and used the above strapline as the base. I then transcribed it into Braille, and carefully placed each note according to itâs braille counterpart. So one letter in my transcribed version can be up to five notes played together.
The percussion is made up entirely of sounds I sampled from a Perkins brailler. The kick drum is the sound of a Perkins being put down on a desk, and the snare and other percussion noises are made from the various keys and knobs being pressed and turned.

Download here.

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More information:
rnib.org.uk/cymru
cardiffinstitutefortheblind.co.uk
perkins.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkins_Brailler

Podcast 4.0

Blodeuwedd's Song

A piece of soundart that I'm trying to get exhibited/played somewhere this year, as it's partly to celebrate Louis Braille's bicentenary and his brilliant invention of Braille (which makes such a difference to blind and partially sighted people’s lives) – and partly to, well, experiment I suppose. I make all kinds of art, material to abstract - and it’s kind of an artist’s duty to experiment. I got all inspired about soundart after my recent trip to New Zealand – Christchurch Art Gallery’s Subsonic exhibition especially.

Blodeuwedd’s Song is my response to how to turn Braille into music. I allocated each dot of the Braille cell a different note of the pentatonic scale, and used a poem I had written about Blodeuwedd as the base. I then transcribed the poem into Braille, and spent about three days placing each note. So one letter in my transcribed version can be up to five notes played together: for variation I spaced them out a little, and lowered the octave of a few, when I felt the poem intensified emotion – so this is a mixture of aleatoric and chosen notes. The soundart is set against a backdrop of a busy woodland and a lone owl.

If you know of anyone/anywhere interested in exhibiting/playing this piece, please pass on my details – the stories of The Mabinogion are a passion of mine, and lots of my art is based on the tales. I’m currently knitting a human skin for Blodeuwedd’s brother Blodeuben, and am also currently making a film called The Birth of Blodeuben.

More information on Blodeuwedd here and here, some on Blodeuben here.
More on Christchurch gallery's subsonic exhibtion here.
More on Louis Braille bicentenary and RNIB's celebrations here.

My exact words

His exact words

Braille Haiku