Summertime bookbinding

Another good way to spend summer days: the first weekend course in bookbinding took place at Drache&Bär.
Drilling, sewing, binding - after Grzegorz's lessons teaching japanese technique of bookbinding, the four students Ana, Francisco, Martina and Berit did their jobs so well and we all had a perfect day.
Of course everybody was proudly going home with their own handmade notebook.
This week, Drache&Bär starts the production of new notebooks for the collection.

Hänsel & Gretel - Making of

The cold and dark months february and march we spent coin model making. Lena had designed two drawing concepts after which we developed eagle, type and identity of the coins.
Since Lena's last made coin model was quite a few years ago,  she had to fresh up technique and carving, getting familiar again with the hard dental gips which the models must be made of.
After many casts, positive and negative forms, the coins Lena developed turned out beautiful.
The topic of Grimms dark and dangerous though happy ending storytelling Hänsel & Gretel, was very tempting and took over: the whole family was involved and excited to take part in Grimms fairytale and we have been living with the witch ever after.

Hänsel & Gretel

In the beginning of this year, Lena was invited for a contest to design a coin-model for the German Federal Ministry of Finance.
The topic was Brother Grimm's fairytale Hänsel und Gretel. After the anniversary of Grimm's collection in 2012, the Ministry of Finance is now releasing six motives of popular Grimm stories, every year one.

After Lenas graphic projects, we did a lot of craftsmen work in dental gips, proposing two projects, each with a motive and a currency side with the german eagle.
The hight range of the carved surface of the models is within 1 mm, so we spent many long winter evenings carving obsessively next to the heater.
One of our proposed models passed the third step of selection, but anyway there was chosen another project for realisation as official coin.

Nevertheless it was great to work on this generous contest and we are very familiar with Hänsel and Gretel now.