Bookmaking with NECC

A multi-faceted bookmaking project where teens made paper from scratch with natural materials, designed unique covers, and bound their homemade pages together by hand to create their very own journals.

In addition to being one of our long-standing food access partners, Millerton’s North East Community Center (NECC) has been participating in Sky High Farm’s educational programming since 2022. Each summer, NECC’s Food Programs team hosts “Food Futures”– a paid internship for teens in the Webutuck, Pine Plains or Dover Plains school districts. Over the course of six weeks, youth aged 14-19 participate in all aspects of their community food access work. This includes harvesting and packing produce at partner farms, setting up and staffing the NECC food pantry, preparing meals in the summer meals kitchen, taking care of community gardens, and attending workshops on everything from outdoor education and trail maintenance to soil science and water conservation.

At Sky High Farm, the Food Futures teens support our vegetable team by volunteering in the garden, and participating in arts education workshops that we coordinate each season. This year, the teens executed a multi-faceted bookmaking project that involved making their own paper from scratch with natural materials, designing their own unique covers, and binding their homemade pages together by hand to create their very own journals.

The primary goal of this bookmaking project was to show the Food Futures crew how they could create something physical that was both useful and creative by utilizing elements from the earth. These teens are intimately acquainted with agriculture, food systems, produce, and viewing the land as a source of nourishment for their bodies. Our educational partnership aims to show how the land can also nourish their creative spirits and curiosities.

For the first part of this workshop, to create the foundation for their books, the food futures teens worked with Cole Solis Jativa to make sheets of paper from scratch through a traditional method that utilizes cotton pulp. Sheets of cotton called linters were torn into small pieces and pulverized in a blender to create a pulp, which was first mixed with a starch solution, then combined with water into unique ratios that determined the paper’s thickness. The mixture was poured into a mold with a fine mesh bottom that sifted the pulp into rectangular sheets. From there, each sheet was laid into a layered system of pellons, felt, and blotters – highly absorbent fabrics that maintained the paper’s shape and aid the evenness of its grain.

Each mold was positioned on top of a sheet of plastic, and with a swift movement that mimics a magician pulling out a tablecloth from beneath a fully set dinner table, the water would be drained through the mesh. While Cole made the process look easy in her demonstration, the teens quickly realized that working together in groups of three was required to make the magic happen: one poured the ratio, one pulled the plastic sheet, and one shook mold so the pulp would settle evenly. They became obsessed with the process and fixated on making each sheet better than the last.

After their initial introductory lesson, the teens took their skills to the next level. During their second session with Cole, they embedded dried flowers and foliage that they foraged from around the farm and added some color by incorporating yellow dye into the pulp mixture for their final round of sheets.

In the second part of this workshop, each teen designed the front and back covers for their journals, which were then bound together with their homemade paper via a coptic stitch to complete the bookmaking process. Two local artist extraordinaires, Maddie Osborne and Julia Kunze, joined the food futures crew to coach them through collaging their covers and to steward the stitching process.

Equipped with stacks of source material ranging from magazines to reference books, jars of modge podge, and lots of washi tape, Julia and Maddie curated the perfect environment for the teens to craft their book covers. Two pieces of bookboard served as their canvases, and they were instructed to decorate every inch (front and back of each board) by collaging, drawing and painting.

On the final day of this workshop series, everyone gathered together for step-by-step instructions on how to perform the coptic stitch– an ancient bookbinding method featuring an exposed, decorative chain-link spine that allows books to open completely flat. Each teen selected piles of handmade paper to fold into signatures (aka small groupings of paper) which were then organized into the sections of their journals. Using a small puncturing tool called an awl, they punctured their signatures and covers to prepare for stitching. As a group, all the teens followed along as Maddie and Julia carefully walked them through each stitch until their journals were finally complete. At the end of the day, while enjoying some celebratory popsicles and watermelon from the Sky High Farm garden, every bookmaker shared about the inspiration for their journal covers, their favorite part of the process, and what they hope to fill their pages with.

Thank you to Cole, Maddie, Julia, and all of the teens in the NECC Food Futures crew for your hard work and dedication to this project!