Nicole LaRosee Reflection

            Altering a book seemed at first to be a daunting and unfamiliar task. I have loved reading and loved books for as long as I can remember; so when we received the email that this was going to be our first assignment, I was hesitant. The book that I chose to use for this assignment was Number the Stars. As I was going through my books at home I came across this book and memories of reading it for the first time surfaced. I remember that it was a required reading book in elementary school and even after I read it for the first time I continued to read it for fun multiple times after that.

As I started to brainstorm what I wanted to do to the book, I began to enjoy the process more than I thought I would. My first idea was to try and match an act with a particular chapter name of the book. This didn’t work out for every idea that I had but for some it worked. I knew that I wanted to burn the book in some way. There was a chapter called “There Has Been a Death”, so I decided to burn this page in the center. The flame burned through the page and you can see that the fire got onto the next page which left a charred browned color onto the next paper.

Another idea that came to me was during the snow storm last week. I was stuck in my room and wondering what I could do to the book. This was when I thought it might be cool to try and make snowflakes out of a page from the book. I ripped a random page out of the book, folded it a few time and cut random pieces out of the paper. Once I was finished, it didn’t really look like a snowflake but it still had an interesting shape so I decided to stick two of them together in an abstract way.

Another time when I was sitting at my desk, I realized that I had a number of different sharpies and that most of them were neon colors. I decided originally to just play around with the sharpies and began to outline the different chapters in the colors to make them pop more. Then once I liked how the pink neon colored looked on the page, I decided to just make straight lines across the entire page to make a cool symmetrical design.

I realized after a while that I would stop whatever I was doing and think about other things that I could do to the book and what would look cool in it. One idea that was hard to do was put candle wax on the pages of the book. I started by dipping the corner of a page into the hot wax and afterward it would dry almost instantly. The problem with doing this process was that I had to dip the corner into the wax very fast so that the page wouldn’t catch on fire. Considering this I didn’t do it as much as I would have liked to. Once the wax dried on the page, it was very smooth and the lavender smell from the candle can be smelt in the book now.

Through this process I realized that I am more open to creatively altering the book than I originally thought I would be. I actually enjoyed the process and had fun trying to think of ways that I could alter the book. I hope that next time I can be even more creative with what I do to alter a book.

Reading Reflection:

One thing that I learned from the readings by Hunter was how many different materials were used as paper before paper even existed. I found it very interesting to read and learn about which materials were used and how some of those materials were even made. The process by which parchment and other materials are made are very detail oriented and a long process. It’s amazing to read how these materials are made and how much work goes into each and every one. It makes me take a step back and think about how much paper we use now and how much we take paper for granted; especially considering how much paper I used to print out these readings! This is one of the reasons that I thought the reading was actually interesting because we got to learn about the entire paper making process as well as all the other various materials that was once used as a writing surface.

Another thing that I learned about paper is how it is defined and what classifies it as true paper. In the reading, paper is defined as “a substance made in the form of thin sheets or leaves from rags, straw, bark, wood, or other fibrous material” (Before paper, page 5). This is interesting because when I think about paper I think that it is made from trees but that’s about where my thinking process stops. I don’t think about everything else that goes into the making of paper and the various materials that were used when it was first developed. For paper to be classified as true paper, the sheets must be made from macerated fiber. This just means that the fiber used must be mixed and softened by water. This definition makes some materials that resemble paper not actually true paper. For example, parchment is made from animal skins. Though this material both feels and looks like paper, it was not made of macerated fibers so it is not true paper.