Join artist Linda Liabenow and discover how to produce your own collection of handmade papers. Feel free to bring various embellishments to enhance your paper pulp (pressed flowers, leaves, confetti, threads, text pages, etc.). Participants will leave with a stack of papers to be dried and pressed at home. No previous experience is needed. Students will need to bring at least two large towels for this workshop.

Meet Your Instructor

Linda is a fiber artist, book-smith living and creating in Northern Michigan. She discovered the technique of papermaking while studying Fiber Arts in college and soon felt inspired to incorporate her extensive paper collections into handbound books. Linda has spent the last 30 years continuing her studies with book artists from Canada, Germany, Scotland, and the United States, and she has earned a Master's degree at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

She begins her artistic process by gathering botanicals from local fields, forests, and her own gardens. The plant materials are then cooked and hand beaten into a fine pulp which is then used for forming sheets of paper, paper clay, vessels, and sculptural forms. The covers of her handbound books may be built from wood, leather, paper clay or vintage textiles. She forages through antique shops to collect vintage ephemera and found objects to incorporate as embellishments for a final touch.

Her work is utilitarian and the themes of each book are intended to spark emotion, nostalgia and creativity in others. Her Concept Journals and Tomes are meant to provide the next owner with a one of a kind depository for thoughts, sketches, or paintings. The result is an eclectic collection of traditional and not so traditional hand-bound books.