People often ask me, “What’s your favorite thing about the Handmade Book Club?” There’s no need to hesitate; my answer to that is always the same. It’s the community. Our community is filled with curious crafters, creatives, and artists from all genres and all skill levels from all over the world. We’re a community defined by its warmth, empathy, encouragement, engagement, and willingness to share time and skills. It’s the reason the Vintage Page Designs logo has “A creative community of craft and kindness” as its tagline.
Although the community holds the top spot in my heart, another aspect I’m particularly fond of is the willingness of our club members to share their expertise. This is why we highlight a guest artist every month. During these sessions, the featured artist demonstrates their techniques while members either observe or join in on the creative process.
A Peek Behind the Curtain
At the time of writing this, we’ve had forty guest artist sessions, and we have a really exciting lineup for the remainder of the year. While many of these artists are cherished members of our own creative community, I also extend invitations to “outside” talents to enrich our club members’ experiences. This post would be rather lengthy if I named everyone we’ve ever featured, but I’ll treat you to a little peek inside the club.
In January, we had an incredible “Whimsical Words in the Garden” session with one of our founding members, Joanne Sharpe. Joanne is an enthusiastic, whimsical artist dedicated to empowering others to embrace personal creativity. Through numerous online classes and art retreats, she shares her playful, colorful art style through innovative instruction for art journaling, hand lettering, textiles, and mixed media art. It was a treat to have Joanne share her work with the club!
We’ve had the privilege of learning about Wabi Sabi nature-printed fabric books from Emma Freeman. Emma is a mixed-media artist and poet who focuses on using art-making and writing for personal healing and meditation. She uses textiles, fibers, found nature, poetry, and slow stitching to create work that helps her calm, ground, and find deeper peace within herself and in the world.
Last year, I invited special guest, Jack Ravi for a mixed-media “Mark Making” session. Jack is a self-taught artist living and working in Scotland, UK. He makes collage and assemblage art with found objects. He’s also the author of the book ‘Artful Memories – How to create unique art with old photographs‘ where he shares his passion for creating meaningful artworks using old photographs.
The Archives
Club members have access to the archives to revisit classes like “Mail Art Wallets” with Bel Mills. Bel showed us how to turn junk mail envelopes into cleverly collaged pocketbooks using basic bookbinding and collage techniques.
And So Much More
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of what we’ve learned within this creative community. We’ve had sessions on paper bag alchemy, cyanotypes, Zentangle, haiku, gelli printing, Chinese thread boxes, fabric meditation books, flower pounding, stamp carving, asemic writing, and yes, the list goes on! We record everything, so even when club members can’t attend our sessions live, they still have the ability to watch at their leisure.
We have so many juicy things happening in the Handmade Book Club, and I’m honored to be able to share and partake in so much creativity with our community. As I always say, we go way beyond just making books.
What is the Handmade Book Club?
The Handmade Book Club grew out of my love for teaching and community. Having spent more than 10 years teaching in-person classes, I decided to reach a wider audience in 2019 and founded the online Handmade Book Club.
The Handmade Book Club is a community of bookmakers from around the world. Each month, I teach a new book binding project to the club members. In addition to making books, we love learning about ways to fill our handmade journals. That’s why we have guest artists and speakers join us every month! Club members also have access to a robust selection of past projects within the archives.
Whether you’re an experienced bookmaker or a complete novice, the Handmade Book Club is a community for you. You can try out a free book project here.
We’d love to have you join us! Sign up for the waitlist!
