ZOOM!

We’re officially Zoomers! NORBAG held its first Zoom online meeting on June 13 attended by 37 members. It was an international meeting with 2 members from England, 9 from 6 different states, 17 from Humboldt County, and 9 from other areas of California. We’re very grateful to Celeste Chalasani for organizing and hosting the meeting.

We started off by taking turns introducing ourselves. What a treat it was to finally put faces to names that we’ve known... sometimes for many years. It was also fun to see some impromptu "guest cats" who wandered into view. Thirteen members sent photos of books they had been working on to Celeste who created a PowerPoint slideshow. Each person was able to give a description of their book, the materials, and/or the inspiration for the structure. Several members had just finished taking Helen Hiebert’s online Flexible Book Structures 2 workshop so they shared photos of some of the projects completed in the class.

Members with a large screen can see a maximum of 25

participants at a time and scroll over to see the rest of the group.

Margaret Beech described some of the photos she shared.

All in all it was a positive experience and one we hope to share again. Our member from York, England, Margaret Beech, has offered to teach a Zoom workshop for us on July 11 so watch for more information in the July newsletter. Please contact Dolores Guffey (contact information in the newsletter) if you have any suggestions, would like to offer to lead a workshop or host a sharing session and she will help to coordinate the event.

Many of our out-of-town members also belong to book art organizations in their local areas. We love to hear what other groups are doing and how they are coping with the challenges the Coronavirus has presented. One activity currently underway with the Puget Sound Book Art group is a collaborative project. Thirty-six members signed up for the “Staying Home” project and were randomly put into six groups of six. Each participant was directed to make a small blank book (4” x 6” size), create an artwork on one page of that book and mail it to the next person on their list. That person would add their own artwork to a page and then mail it to the next person and so on until all six books were completed and each participant would keep the last book they received. Ideally this should take about six weeks with a goal to finish by July 19. The hope is to actually share these books in person later this year. The following photo is the cover of one of those books.

The artist who created this book has invited

the other five group members to also add

artwork of their own to this cover.

Be sure to look for more information in the newsletter and future blog article about our next Zoom meeting in July. Thank you to Bobbie Hayes for sharing her Zoom photos.