Creating dress of old book bits works
WHEN is a badly damaged book a thing of beauty?
When Dunedin Public Library assistant Jill Bowie gets her hands on it and makes it into a rather stunning dress.
‘‘My whole thing is about recycling,’’ Ms Bowie said. So when a large and very thick library book was too badly damaged to be sold by the library, she decided to recycle it.
The Otago Polytechnic School of Fashion graduate and 2016 winner of the Recycled section of the Hokonui Fashion Design Awards used a technique called quilling to make the skirt of the dress. She cut strips of paper from the pages of the damaged book, rolled the strips and glued them together to make large panels.
Ms Bowie said she had always wanted to use paper-quilling in a dress but was unsure whether it would be strong enough. The skirt is supported by a wire frame Ms Bowie cobbled together from wire and duct tape.
For the strapless bodice of her creation, she used offcuts of buckram (sized linen from bookbinding). She decorated the front panel of the bodice using recycled golden beads, sequins and thread. The leaf design was inspired by the work of Mary Eleanor Joachim, a former Dunedin bookbinder whose intricate designs Ms Bowie discovered last year in the Reed Collection.
‘‘It took me ages,’’ she said. She completed it in January this year, for the Creative Cities exhibition. It is on display on the third floor of the Dunedin Public Library.
The dress is probably the first entry in Books As Art, a new initiative by the Regent Theatre to support the Regent 24Hour Book Sale.
‘‘Books As Art is a great opportunity for people to reuse books in a creative way, ensuring they have a new life,’’ organisers and Regent The atre Trust of Otago board members Jennifer Anglin and Matthias Schorer said.
They envisaged the inaugural event would capture the imagination of all ages and become an iconic part of Dunedin’s cultural fabric, just as the Regent 24Hour Book Sale has for the past 37 years.
A panel of artists, headed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery director Cam McCracken, will judge the Books As Art entries and items of the book art will be displayed during the sale and will be available to buy, a percentage of the sales supporting the Regent Theatre’s community ownership.