My Wordy Valentine.

My handmade valentines in past years have often been of the “a picture’s worth a thousand words” variety, with paper cuts or found images.  But this year I decided to let the dictionary speak for me.  This valentine includes definitions of words (like together, pair, gaga, etc.) that evoke the holiday, clipped out of an old, bedraggled dictionary from my undergraduate days.  Now, before anyone gets all moral over my cutting up a book, please keep in mind that: one, it was MY dictionary, not a library’s; two, it was old (but not old and wonderful like Samuel Johnson’s—just old); and three, in using it this way I give a new life to printed matter that has outlived its original purpose—a practice of which I’m always a fan.

This little valentine is based on a snake book structure that I learned about in Esther K. Smith’s book Magic Books & Paper Toys. The snake book folds flat and can be secured in different ways; I simply pierced it and threaded red embroidery wool through it. If you like playing with paper, you’ll like Magic Books & Paper Toys.  It’s just one of three books by Smith (How to Make Books and The Paper Bride are her others) that offer easy-to-follow instructions, inspiring ideas for how to personalize basic shapes, and a solid tour of the creative heights to which book artists take these structures.  And this weekend Esther will be the Library’s special guest at Handmade Crafternoon, and we’ll all get the chance to try out some of her favorite book structures.  I’m looking forward to learning more!