2025 Conference Workshops

Palimpsests: Layering Letters on Parchment

Instructor Madison Bennett

This workshop offers hands-on experience working with parchment, a writing and binding material made of stretched and dried animal skin. Unlike paper, parchment has the unique ability to be written on, scraped down, and written on again—what’s known as a “palimpsest”—making it an exciting substrate for lettering and experimentation. Participants will ultimately prepare, design, and letter a piece of goatskin. Palimpsests can be text-based or image-based, and participants will use a variety of mixed media (calligraphy pens, watercolor, Japanese hole punches, embroidery thread, gold leaf, and more) no matter their calligraphic experience. Resulting palimpsests can exist as finished pieces or as the covers for future limp parchment bindings.

The workshop will also include an overview of the history of parchment and parchmentmaking, highlighting the differences between calf, goat, and sheep—which bookbinders may more readily recognize from working with leather. Parchment is often intimidating because of its price, but it offers artists the ability to erase easily and redo work. This is a great workshop for getting your hands dirty, getting creative, and perhaps working with a familiar material in new ways.

Embroidered Initials on Paper

Instructor Erin Fletcher

Embroidering the surface of paper creates an alluringly tactile effect that can enhance any design. In this workshop, Erin Fletcher will be sharing her technique for transferring a design and preparing paper for embroidery. She’ll demonstrate the simple and versatile stitches commonly found in her work, along with a range of surface techniques that pair well with embroidery. Students will use these skills to make two small plaquettes.

The Continuously Convoluting Carousel

Instructor Graham Patten

In this workshop we will be learning to construct the Continuously Convoluting Carousel. This is a multiplex carousel binding that can be inverted on itself indefinitely, revealing a sequence of four different hidden openings or displays. A number of versions of the structure will be explored during the presentation portion, and participants will complete at least one binding over the course of the day.

Traditional Calligraphic Recreation

Instructor Cheryl Jacobsen

Workshop participants will familiarize themselves with the tools and techniques necessary to recreate an example of historic calligraphy.

From the instructor: "This is not your typical calligraphy class. While you will be learning lettering, your teachers will be the historical manuscript hands themselves and not my personal version of them. The emphasis will be on understanding how scribes worked and not so much on becoming proficient on any one hand. This is a class of investigation, of looking and learning to see, of doing and figuring things out. You will learn Edward Johnston’s 7-step process of analyzing manuscripts and feel what it’s like to use the tools and write the letters."