I was walking home from a successful trip to Goodwill last week and I spotted some huge palm fronds in my neighbor’s garden trash.  After checking that was ok with her I came home to get my garden snips and walked back to harvest a couple of pieces.

When I got home I left them in water for a couple of days until I had a clear time slot and a clear table.  I gathered some large sheets of paper and some smaller papers including rice paper, corrugated cardboard,  brown kraft paper, ledger paper, book paper from a vintage garden catalogue and of course dry wax paper.

I used a combination of gelli plate and adding paint directly to the leaves to print them, both worked well but I wish there was a giant gelli plate!!!

See!  Very big leaves!!

Once everything had dried, I wanted to make a book or two using my newly printed papers.

One book was made with a single sheet of printed paper folded into an accordion.  I glued the backs of the pages together to give it a bit more stability.  The paper I used was pretty thin, so the book is not bulky at all.  Then I used the brown paper as a cover.

The second book is a good ole pamphlet stitch book with 7 sheets folded and stitched down the spine.  There is no special cover just stitched and ready to go. For this book I used smaller papers like the book pages, ledger paper and sketchbook paper.

If you need book binding ideas and good instructions, check out Esther K Smith’s ‘How to Make Books’. I must have checked this book out of my local library a hundred times!

For all of these prints I used black gesso and a brayer to apply the paint either to my gelli plate to to the leaf directly.

Keep your eyes peeled and your gelli plate at the ready, you never know when inspiration or printing materials may appear!

Happy Friday x