What to Do with All Your Eco-Prints: Artist Books & Momigami

What do you do with all those beautiful eco-printed papers piling up in your studio?

In this hands-on class, we’ll explore ways to transform eco-prints into artist books, folded structures, and tactile paper objects. We’ll experiment with momigami, a traditional Japanese technique of treating paper with konnyaku to create a strong, flexible, cloth-like material that can be folded, stitched, and manipulated.

Using your own eco-printed papers*, we’ll explore simple book structures, folding and binding techniques, layering, and ways of combining individual prints into a cohesive artist book. Along the way, we’ll consider how sequencing, repetition, scale, and the physical act of handling paper can transform a collection of individual prints into a larger work.

Class fee $250 (all materials other than prints will be provided)

Location Conway MA, exact location provided upon registration

What You’ll Make:

Each participant will leave with two handmade artist books:

• A drum-leaf binding book, a versatile structure that allows individual pages to come together without sewing, creating opportunities for layering, sequencing, and visual relationships between your prints.

• A cased-in pamphlet stitch book, introducing a simple sewn binding and a more finished, covered book form.

Along the way, we’ll experiment with momigami, folding, sequencing, layering, and combining papers to discover how a collection of individual prints can become something more than a stack of beautiful sheets.

What to Bring

* Don’t have a stash of eco-printed papers? No problem! While eco-prints are at the heart of this class, you can bring other printed papers, photographs, collages, botanical prints, or beautiful papers that you’d like to transform into artist books.

Think of this as an opportunity to finally do something with those special papers you’ve been saving. Bring a small collection to experiment with—we’ll explore how different papers, images, textures, and patterns can come together through folding, layering, momigami, and simple book structures. Choose papers that are reasonably strong and not too thin or brittle.