Owl Post - September 2024
In the bindery this month there has been much hard work on various binding projects for The Sydney Craft Week festival (11th to 20th October) and Sydney Rare Book Week (19th to 23rd October) and Sydney Rare Book Fair (24th to 26th October).
It was rather exciting to wait for the launch of Sydney Craft Week website and to see if people would buy tickets right away for our workshops. Well, they did! And we gleefully had the unanticipated fun of seeing some events beginning to fill up. We have planned a series of engaging workshops - Sketchbook Printmaking (13th October), Make your own journal in our Beginner Bookbinding (16th October) workshop and a very special behind the scenes tour during Open Bindery (19th October); see our day-to-day working, a demonstration on traditional gold tooling, maybe even time to make a quick notebook and tea and cakes of course! Book now on our website.
Meanwhile, everything carries on as 'normal'. Though what is ‘normal’ here in the bindery remains an elusive mystery. I suppose it’s being in the workspace to start, listening to beautiful arias from famous operas (Donizatti: L’elisir d’amore, Gluck: Orphée et Eurydice) to jog the early morning brain into action. Morning tea with the team, promptly at 10am (Belinda of course, sometimes Jenni, and ever hopeful one day, on our wistful wish list, a bindery cat? preferably two... sigh). A sit down lunch at 12pm and on most Thursdays after lunch we like to stretch our legs and visit the Sydney Rare Book Auction for a chat and to peruse their exciting shelves for potential volumes.
Some enchanted mornings we treat ourselves to a meeting in a cafe where we get to enjoy catered food in-place of our usual homemade fare (it's always rather exciting to procure a fancy bakery cinnamon bun or almond croissant to take back to the bindery for tea at 4pm).
Other outings we have on our wish list is the Australian Museum Sharks and Rays exhibition perfect for the upcoming school holidays, and we quite fancy taking in Gilgamesh at the Sydney Opera House, the world’s oldest poem set into an opera composed by Sydney Chamber Opera Artistic Director Jack Symonds.
We finally got to watch the rather fabulous BBC series of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, directed by Emily Mortimer starring Emily Beechan and Lily James and was inspired to re-read all the books in the series The Pursuit of Love, Love in a cold climate and Don’t tell Alfred, just pure deliciousness.
Our Wild Binders Artists books group have produced so much creativity lately, do you want to make books and print like us? Watch out for the opening of the club membership next month. Due to tedious things like insurance etc, we are limited to having only 50 members year.
There are still tickets to be had for our Sydney Craft week and Sydney Rare Book week events, particularly our Beginner Bookbinding workshop on Wednesday morning and our Open Bindery Tours, and coming to even one will allow you to have a lot of fun - make a wee notebook to take home, enjoy tea and cake in our kitchenette and a chance to meet the team.
Isabelle