You don't know what you don't know

Preparing for an Art of the Heart day of reflection and creativity in a couple of weeks: Transitions and Thresholds. My colleague and co-facilitator suggested the possibility of an accordion fold book as a relevant creative activity. After hours of working with words and images, my sample pages were "missing" something -- but I didn't know what.

Last week, I did a Zoom workshop with a gifted papermaker from Colorado, Helen Hiebert. In her introduction, she talked about her year-long course, and about her next offering – a tunnel book – and showed us her prototype.

I had never heard of tunnel books, but looked them up online, where there are multiple examples. And I KNEW that the three-dimensionality of a tunnel book is visually congruent with the idea of making something concrete to express transitions and thresholds.

In spite of having made many different kinds of small hand-made books over the past years, it was an aha moment to find the "missing" piece in my quest for the best creative activity for this special day. You don't know what you don't know, until you stumble across it. Thank you Helen!