Happy New Year! Looking Ahead To 2013

Along with our wishes for a happy new year, we’d also like to say thank you to our readers for making last year such a rewarding one for us.  We appreciate your shared insights and feedback, and thank you for being part of our virtual preservation community.

2013 is already off to an exciting start, beginning with a frozen pipe which burst in the offices of our Special Collections and Archives over break.  Since I was basking in the Arizona sunshine at the time, Hilary will fill you in on the details of that escapade next Tuesday.  We’re also in the midst of our search for the 2013 Lennox Foundation Intern; if you or someone you know is planning to apply, please note the January 17 deadline.

Parks Library, Iowa State University

As we look ahead to the rest of 2013, are there any favorite topics you would like to see us revisit?  We’ve covered topics as diverse as disaster response, conservation treatments, digitization projects, book and paper arts, commercial binding, reformatting, book reviews, conferences, sustainability, whimsical quizzes, and local preservation events.  Are there topics we’ve never discussed that you wish we would?  Guest bloggers from other departments of the Library from whom you’d like to hear?  Join our conversation!

Wishing you all a productive and fulfilling 2013!

 

1091 Project: Let’s Celebrate!

This month, the 1091 Project takes a quick peek at one aspect of departmental culture in the conservation labs of Iowa State University Library and Duke University Libraries.  To celebrate the end of each Fall semester, ISU Preservation Department holds a “staff development day.”  The staff vote on a type of project or handskill to work on during the day-long workshop, we gather our resources, and then have at it.  This year, we decided to take our theme from the discussion/debate arising from a recent blog post, and settled on upcycling discarded paper-based materials such as books, dust-jackets, magazines, and maps.  Preservation Assistant Mindy McCoy created this Pinterest board full of project ideas to inspire and instruct us.

A bookcart overflowing with craft supplies and materials to be “upcycled.”

Lori, from Digital Initiatives, meticulously cut strips from pages of children’s books which she will later fold, chain together, and weave into a basket.

One popular project several of us tried was building a gift topper bow out of strips of paper secured with double-sided tape. Pictured here are bows made from dust-jackets from architecture coffee table books, a map, and pages from a Russian dictionary.

Conservation Technician Mindy Moe turned a gift topper bow into an ornament with a button, ribbon, hot glue, and a little ingenuity.

Our conservation volunteer Martha went big! She rolled maps into a sunburst around a decorative mirror.

Jim, from Preservation Services, turned a book about fish into a 3D sculpture.

Jim also created this tribute to his friend’s dog Floyd, who has since moved on to that great dog kennel in the sky, but not before chewing up this case binding.

Now let’s see how they’re observing the end of the semester and the approach of the winter holidays over at Preservation Underground!

 

On Our Bookshelves: Big Book of Boxes (2009)

Big Book of Boxes (Evergreen Publishers, 2009) is a book of box patterns with minimal text in seven languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch.  The boxes are not specifically for library or preservation purposes (you can read about the boxes we make in our Conservation Lab in our previous post, 1091 Project: Boxes), but could certainly be fashioned or modified for lab use.  The patterns are divided into categories which include basic models, boxes for the office, boxes for clothes and accessories, boxes for children’s bedrooms, boxes for food and drink, decorative accessory boxes, themed holiday boxes, and boxes for gifts.  Each pattern page has a multi-lingual description and a gray-scale sketch of the finished box (see photos below).  The book comes with a CD-ROM of printable versions of all of the patterns.  I’m frankly charmed by both the functional and whimsical boxes described in this book.

Click on image to enlarge.

Click on image to enlarge.

Inspired by Big Book of Boxes, we’ve added experimental box-making to our list of potential ideas for our annual holiday staff development workshop.  Have any of you used the patterns in this book to make boxes?  We’d love to hear about successes or challenges in the Comments section, as well as any other box-pattern books you recommend.

 

Paper Quilling for “Gentle Ladies of Quality”

As with any job, it is always nice to take some time to develop skills that make you better at your job. In the case of those working here in the Preservation Lab, we like to take opportunities like this a couple of times a year. One of those times is often around the holidays after our student employees have gone home for the semester. You may recall last year we worked on a new (to us) sewing technique, the icicle stitch. This year we settled on quilling, which requires a lot of dexterity to manipulate the paper strips and careful, precise gluing.

Monks & nuns practiced the art of quilling by using strips of paper trimmed from gilded edges of books. In Europe, “gentle ladies of quality” practiced the art of quilling, because it was thought to be “not too taxing for their minds or gentle dispositions.” (From Wikipedia: Quilling.)  We can assure you that quilling taxes both the mind and the disposition!

Doing a simple search for quilling on Google, Flickr, or even YouTube, will result in a wide variety of images both extravagant and simple. Instead of purchasing special quilling tools, we used what we had. We made our own quilling tools to twirl the strips of paper by using a cork & a sewing needle with the end of the eye snipped off (and it works pretty well!)  We used the DIY Quilling Tool tutorial found here.

homemade quilling tool

We played with different types of papers to see how well each one quilled. We had text-weight copy paper, card stock, paper with a shimmery coating, etc.  We originally had planned to use a paper shredder to make our quilling strips, but none of us had a shredder that made strips our desired width (3 mm).  We ended up cutting some strips on the guillotine, but mostly we chose to use store-bought quilling paper from a craft supply store.

Though we discovered a love-hate relationship with quilling, you can find many examples of people who love quilling by searching the internet.  One of our favorites is the extremely talented Yulia Brodskaya. In hopes that we would love quilling as much as Yulia, I have to say that it is definitely an art that takes much practice and patience. We have all decided that we will be keeping our day jobs, but enjoyed our day learning about this fabulous paper art.