Fall 2025 Workshop
Making Miniature Books with Peter and Donna Thomas
Date: Saturday, October 11, 2025,
Time: 9 AM – 3 PM
Location: KCC’83CBA Book Arts Studio, Studio160, Crewe Center for the Arts
111 Bedford St. Portland, ME 04103
Workshop Fee: $100
Maximum Enrollment: 15
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
This class will introduce participants to new and innovative book structures from simple and complex accordion books that have been developed or explored in depth by the instructors, while at the same time teaching the basic bookbinding skills required to create them. Participants will make two of the artist book structures described in Thomas’s book “More Making Books by Hand” published in 2004 by Quarry/Rockport Publishers.
RECOMMENDED TOOLS TO BRING (if you have them)
- Glue brush: a stiff 1/2 inch wide acrylic paint brush or alternate for spreading glue
- Bone folder
- scissors
- 12-inch metal ruler
- Awl or needle
- Pencil
- Break off blade mat knife
- Any decorative paper, paints, watercolors, pens, rubber stamps, etc., to illustrate and add text to your books. You might also want to bring small images and small objects to collage.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTORS:
Peter and Donna Thomas are book artists from Santa Cruz, California. They work collaboratively, making both edition and one-of-a-kind books. They make the paper, print, illustrate, and bind their books, combining the precision of the fine press aesthetic with the structural creativity found in contemporary artists’ books. Between 2009 and 2019, they made four cross-country road trips, traveling in their artistic tiny home on wheels as the “Wandering Book Artists,” teaching classes and giving talks about the book arts as they visited universities and community-based book arts centers around the country. They are authors of More Making Books by Hand, and editors of 1000 Artists’ Books, and in 2021, The Legacy Press published a descriptive bibliography of their work: Peter and Donna Thomas: Bibliography, 1974–2020. Learn more here: http://wanderingbookartists.blogspot.com/
For more information, please contact:
Annie Lee-Zimerle, Program Coordinator
(207) 228-8014 or aemin.leezimerle@maine.edu
usm.maine.edu/bookarts
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