Raised Shell Heart Wedding Guest Album
I have to confess, hearts really aren't my favorite thing (design-wise), but I do like to try to make book covers look the way the customer wants them to look. This couple had a heart-made-out-of-shells design embossed on their wedding invitations and really wanted it incorporated into their album. This album had many of the most time-consuming elements possible. Rounded and high relief designs on a cover are challenging, but I could not figure out how else to make the shells actually look like shells. Each shell was hand-carved from many layers of laminated binder's board before being added to the cover, covered with burgundy pigskin leather, and the leather was worked down into each shell design by hand. This couple had a long quote on the back cover (each word set up one letter at a time with moveable metal type). This bride originally wanted everything done in peach. Peach leather was not available (the leather colors available to me for this type of high relief cover that also has lettering stamped in foil on it are very limited). So she settled on burgundy leather with ivory/peach accents. The endpapers and ribbon page marker were a light peach color and the copper lettering on the back seemed to fit in with the rest of the color scheme. This couple also wanted a large, single raised shell on the back cover. It seems obvious now, but at the time I never thought about the fact that something done in high relief on the back cover would cause the book to rock on its back when laid flat on the table. This would make it challenging for guests to write in. The solution I came up with was to make a pillow for the book. The pillow was filled with sand in keeping with the beach theme and the sand also allowed the raised shell on the back cover to make an indentation in the surface of the pillow so that, when laid on the pillow, the book would lay flat and not rock back and forth on the raised shell. I am not a seamstress by any stretch of the imagination! I have only used a sewing machine once in my life. But thanks to the very nice folks at a local sewing store, I was talked-through the making of the sand-filled pillow. I just could not accept the idea that this book would be awkward to write in. But I am no longer inclined to do any covers with high relief designs on the back for this reason. I thought it came out well...for a heart design! This album measured roughly 10"x10".
An album with this much high, rounded relief work and lettering on the cover would cost around $550. Not inlcuding the sand pillow which I think is a one-time-only, not-to-be-repeated item.
