Hello everyone, today I want to tell you about my tree book. First of all, a tree book is a project we did for school in Language Arts class. We worked on this for 71 whole days, from March 5th- May 15th. We had a helper helping us with these tree books too, her name was Peg Gignoux (check out her website! gignouxart.com) now let me tell you the process of these tree books.
1. Screen printing
The first thing we did to create these beautiful tree books were screen printing. Screen printing was when we take something from nature for example leaves, sticks, etc. Then what we do is we paint over it and it makes a beautiful picture
2. Folding
Next we had to actually fold the paper to get it to what it is now. We hot dog folded it, we hamburger folded it, and we glued it until we got all the actual shape. When we did stuff with paint or glue or something wet we would leave it out to dry. We wouldn’t fold it.
3. Akua Ink
This was my favorite part of making my tree book. So what we would do for Akua printing is we would take a thick slab that had some words on it. Then we would take a piece of paper, lightly put some paint over it, and then we would take a brayer ( roller ) and roll over it. Then you would take that and roll it on pieces of paper and it was beautiful. It was so fun at the same time too.
4. collaging
This was a fun stage! First of all if you don’t know what collaging is I’ll explain, collaging is when you take paper ( colored paper is used mostly ) and you cut it into really cool shapes and then glue it something. This is what I felt really made up the art in the book and it was really fun to do this to!
5. Pockets
The pockets or little coin packets were what we put the writing part of our tree book and we put 1 or 2 on the inside, or 1 or 2 on the outside. But in total we put the pockets, and I’ll explain what we put in the pockets in our next step.
6. When This Is Over, Life List, My wish, Salute To My Roots
These are the writing we put in our pockets. I’ll explain each one to you. When This Is Over is a little poem we wrote saying two things. One of them was a list of things were going to do after the pandemic and the second is qualities we want to keep that we created over the pandemic. We put this in our book but not in one of the pockets.
Life List is a list of things we want to do in our life, but the thing is they’re are no limits, for example you could say I want to run at the speed of light. We put this in one of our pockets.
The next thing, Salute To My Roots was a paragraph writing on someone in our roots. For example your dad, your grandpa, or even your aunt and uncle. Then we wrote a letter small paragraph of appreciation, and this went into another one of the pockets.
My Wish was 2-3 wishes that were huge put not so crazy, things that you think could really happen and you wrote them down on your actual tree book or you could just print it then put that in your tree book. For the last pocket, a picture was taken of us and wrapped around in a ribbon.
7. Wishtree by Kathrine Applegate
This was not a process of the tree book, but this is a book that helped encourage it. This book has a ton to do about a tree and wishes, personally me recommending you this, I would check it out.
8. Frank Gallery
Then we took the tree books to the Frank Gallery, which is such a huge honor, just imagine being a 6th grader and having your work in a gallery. I didn’t get to experience it though because I was on vacation, but I imagine it would have been so fun
Lastly I just want to say that I had a ton of fun making these tree books, and the best part was the result. The result was just outstanding. So now I challenge you to try to make a tree book but if you can’t, don’t worry at least we can say you tried!
