Said her name was Marie, from the banks of the Lee
@elixirmixxer
alchemist, lover of Sufi poetry, Bollywood fan, dusty wanderer, enjoys good food, dear friends, card games, and things as catch fire. (she/her/hers pronouns)
So Mario of ParPouPrivateLabel messaged me on Etsy asking if I could make him a custom book. After a bit of discussion we hammered out exactly what he wanted and I got to work.
The story starts with a trip to the local art store for some watercolours. Mario wanted red splattered edges and watercolours are an excellent way to accomplish this is to use watercolours (which are highly pigmented and don’t glue the pages together like acrylics can).
The end pages were done first.
Then I got to work on the actual book guts. The shards were folded into clusters and then saw cut.
Then the clusters were sewn together into the book guts. I decided to use red tapes. They will never be seen but I liked the idea of carrying on the red and white theme.
The edges were then trimmed square.
After rounding the splattering could happen! I clamped the book guts between some boards and splattered the paint over the edges. It may look random but there was a lot of work involved in making so there weren’t too many small or big splatters - that there weren’t too many splatters in one particular spot or that they looked aesthetically like splatters.
After the splatters came the the lining of the spine. I used some black indian cotton to build up to the level of the tapes.
And pasted the edges down onto some tough (but thin) paper for hinges. The hinges were then trimmed to look neat.
Dividers were added to the centre of each cluster in preparation for sewing the headbands. Some thin boards have been glued to the hinges as cover board bases.
After the headband sewing the satin ribbon was glued on.
Spine and secondary covers were attached. and trimmed to size.
There was a fair bit of discussion on where exactly to put Mario’s logo and in the end we decided that this was the best position and the raised design was glued on.
I used one of my leather cutting templates to free a bit of white lamb leather from the hide. This leather is gorgeously soft and feels really nice in hand.
Plentiful amounts of glue were added to the areas that needed affixing. For most of the cover I used a PVA + paste maix, but over the logo I used a tacky craft PVA which works brilliantly for making raised and recessed designs as the leather sticks to it more readily.
A small square of yoga mat is the best thing I’ve found for the initial refining of raised / recessed designs. It is soft but firm enough to press the leather into the design evenly.
Then with the right tools you can refine the edges and make everything look crisp.
This is how the turn-ins look just after poking the leather into the spine.
And this is after the leather has been pushed into where it needs to go and neatened up.
After all the turn-ins have happened I trimmed the edges of the leather square.
And then a piece of cardboard the same thickness as the leather is glued into the hole to bring everything up to the same level. The end pages are then glued down.
Then you’re pretty much done!
I am glad Mario was happy with this book as I had a great time making it and I’m really pleased with the end result from a makers point of view. I love getting interesting orders like this.
Check out Mario’s Fashion design work:
https://www.parpou.com/
https://www.instagram.com/parpouprivatelabel/
Thanks heaps for reading and I’ll catch you in the next build blog.
__
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Mohamed Bzeek knew that. But in his more than two decades as a foster father, he took them in anyway — the sickest of the sick in Los Angeles County’s sprawling foster care system.
He has buried about 10 children. Some died in his arms.
Now, Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a bedridden 6-year-old foster girl with a rare brain defect. She’s blind and deaf. She has daily seizures. Her arms and legs are paralyzed.
Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life.
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said. “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”
Of the 35,000 children monitored by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, there are about 600 children at any given time who fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs, said Rosella Yousef, an assistant regional administrator for the unit.
There is a dire need for foster parents to care for such children.
And there is only one person like Bzeek.
“If anyone ever calls us and says, ‘This kid needs to go home on hospice,’ there’s only one name we think of,” said Melissa Testerman, a DCFS intake coordinator who finds placements for sick children. “He’s the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it.”
Typically, she said, children with complex conditions are placed in medical facilities or with nurses who have opted to become foster parents.
But Bzeek is the only foster parent in the county known to take in terminally ill children, Yousef said. Though she knows the single father is stretched thin caring for the girl, who requires around-the-clock care, Yousef still approached him at a department Christmas party in December and asked if he could possibly take in another sick child.
This time, Bzeek politely declined.
Bzeek is a quiet, religious man who wants his foster daughter to know she’s not alone in this life. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
:::
The girl sits propped up with pillows in the corner of Bzeek’s living room couch. She has long, thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and perfectly arched eyebrows over unseeing gray eyes.
Because of confidentiality laws, the girl is not being identified. But a special court order allowed The Times to spend time at Bzeek’s home and to interview people involved in his foster daughter’s case.
The girl’s head is too small for her 34-pound body, which is too small for her age. She was born with an encephalocele, a rare malformation in which part of her brain protruded through an opening in her skull, according to Dr. Suzanne Roberts, the girl’s pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Neurosurgeons removed the protruding brain tissue shortly after her birth, but much of her brain remains undeveloped.
She has been in Bzeek’s care since she was a month old. Before her, he cared for three other children with the same condition.
“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” he said.
Bzeek, 62, is a portly man with a long, dark beard and a soft voice. The oldest of 10 children, he came to this country from Libya as a college student in 1978.
Years later, through a mutual friend, he met a woman named Dawn, who would become his wife. She had become a foster parent in the early 1980s, before she met Bzeek. Her grandparents had been foster parents, and she was inspired by them, Bzeek said. Before she met Bzeek, she opened her home as an emergency shelter for foster children who needed immediate placement or who were placed in protective custody.
Dawn Bzeek fell in love with every child she took in. She took them to professional holiday photo sessions, and she organized Christmas gift donation drives for foster children.
She was funny, Bzeek said during a recent drive home from the hospital. She was absolutely terrified of spiders and bugs, so much that even Halloween decorations creeped her out — but she was never scared by the children’s illnesses or the possibility that she would die, Bzeek said.
The Bzeeks opened their Azusa home to dozens of children. They taught classes on foster parenting — and how to handle a child’s illness and death — at community colleges. Dawn Bzeek was such a highly regarded foster mother that her name appeared on statewide task forces for improving foster care alongside doctors and policymakers.
Bzeek started caring for foster children with Dawn in 1989, he said. Often, the children were ill.
Mohamed Bzeek first experienced the death of a foster child in 1991. She was the child of a farm worker who was pregnant when she breathed in toxic pesticides sprayed by crop dusters. She was born with a spinal disorder, wore a full body cast and wasn’t yet a year old when she died on July 4, 1991, as the Bzeeks prepared dinner.
“This one hurt me so badly when she died,” Bzeek said, glancing at a photograph of a tiny girl in a frilly white dress, lying in a coffin surrounded by yellow flowers.
By the mid-1990s, the Bzeeks decided to specifically care for terminally ill children who had do-not-resuscitate orders because no one else would take them in.
There was the boy with short-gut syndrome who was admitted to the hospital 167 times in his eight-year life. He could never eat solid food, but the Bzeeks would sit him at the dinner table, with his own empty plate and spoon, so he could sit with them as a family.
There was the girl with the same brain condition as Bzeek’s current foster daughter, who lived for eight days after they brought her home. She was so tiny that when she died a doll maker made an outfit for her funeral. Bzeek carried her coffin in his hands like a shoe box.
“The key is, you have to love them like your own,” Bzeek said recently. “I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” Mohamed Bzeek says. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Bzeek’s only biological son, Adam, was born in 1997 — with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. He was a child so fragile that changing his diaper or his socks could break his bones.
Bzeek said he was never angry about his own son’s disabilities. He loved him all the same.
“That’s the way God created him,” Bzeek said.
Now 19, Adam weighs about 65 pounds and has big brown eyes and a shy grin. When at home, he gets around the house on a body skateboard that his father made for him out of a miniature ironing board, zooming across the wood floor, steering with his hands.
Adam studies computer science at Citrus College, driving his electric wheelchair to class. He’s the smallest student in class, Bzeek said, “but he’s a fighter.”
Adam’s parents never glossed over how sick his foster siblings were, and they told him the children were going to eventually die, Bzeek said. They accepted death as part of life — something that made the small joys of living all the more meaningful.
“I love my sister,” the shy teenager said of the foster girl. “Nobody should have to go through so much pain.”
About 2000, Dawn Bzeek, once such an active advocate for foster children, became ill. She suffered from powerful seizures that would leave her weak for days. She could hardly leave the house because she didn’t want to collapse in public.
The frustrations of her illness wore on her, Bzeek said. There was stress in the marriage, and she and Bzeek split in 2013. She died a little over a year later.
Bzeek chokes up when he talks about her. When it came to facing the difficulties of the children’s illnesses, the knowledge that they would die, she was always the stronger one, he said.
:::
On a chilly November morning, Bzeek pushed the girl’s wheelchair and the IV pole that carries her feeding formula into Children’s Hospital on Sunset Boulevard. She was wrapped in a soft pink blanket, her head resting on a pillow with the stitched words: “Dad is like duct tape holding our home together.”
The temperatures had been bouncing up and down that week, and the girl had a cold. Her brain cannot fully regulate her body temperature, so one leg was hot while the other was cold.
On the elevator, her face glowed bright red as she coughed, her throat filled with phlegm, screaming for air. People in the elevator looked away.
Bzeek rubbed her cheek playfully and held her hand, waving it playfully. “Heeeey, mama,” he cooed in her ear, calming her down.
For Bzeek, the hospital has become a second home. When he’s not here, he’s often on the phone with her many doctors, the insurers who fight over who’s paying for it all, the lawyers who represent her and her social workers. Any time they leave the house together, he carries a thick black binder filled with her medical records and pages of medications.
Still, Bzeek — who had to be licensed through the county to care for medically fragile children and receives about $1,700 a month for her care — is not able to make medical decisions for her.
Roberts entered the exam room, smiling at the girl’s frilly socks and brown dress with fall-colored leaves.
“There’s our princess,” the doctor said. “She’s in her pretty dress, as always.”
Roberts has known Bzeek for years and has seen many of his foster children. By the time this girl was age 2, Roberts said, doctors said there were no more interventions to improve her condition.
“Nobody ever wants to give up,” she said. “But we had run through the options.”
But the girl, who is hooked to feeding and medication tubes at least 22 hours a day, has lived as long as she has because of Bzeek, the doctor said.
“When she’s not sick and in a good mood, she’ll cry to be held,” Roberts said. “She’s not verbal, but she can make her needs known. … Her life is not complete suffering. She has moments where she’s enjoying herself and she’s pretty content, and it’s all because of Mohamed.”
Mohamed Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for the bedridden child. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Other than trips to the hospital and Friday prayers at the mosque — when the day nurse watches her — Bzeek rarely leaves the house.
To avoid choking, the girl sleeps sitting up. Bzeek sleeps on a second couch next to hers. He doesn’t sleep much.
:::
On a Saturday in early December, Bzeek, Adam and the girl’s nurse, Marilou Terry, had a celebratory lunch for the child’s sixth birthday. He invited her biological parents. They didn’t come.
Bzeek crouched in front of the girl — wearing a long, red-and-white dress and matching socks — and held her hands, clapping them together.
“Yay!” he said, cheerfully. “You are 6! 6! 6!”
Bzeek lit six birthday candles in a cheesecake and sat the girl on the kitchen table, holding the cake near her face so she could feel the warmth of the flames.
As they sang “Happy Birthday,” Bzeek leaned over her left shoulder, his beard gently brushing the side of her face. She smelled the smoke, and a small smile crossed her face.
Please consider donating to the GoFundMe set up in his name!!
GUYS
https://twitter.com/AltNatParkSer/status/824054953404669953
http://www.scientistsmarchonwashington.com/
THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IS IN OPEN REBELLION
Patreon is a slow process, and it takes a while to build up a following. Give yourself time and just warn your followers that you may not be able to make boggle work if you can't get to 300$ a month, there are people who would be happy to help you get to that goal. Just make sure to allow people to donate small amounts, some of us are very poor and we can really only afford to donate 1-5$ a month.
Don’t worry, donating a dollar a month is possible and would be really, really appreciated! I know that Patreon takes a while to build up, and honestly I’m not sure if this will work. I feel embarrassed at asking for help at all; I don’t feel like I deserve to have you guys come out and support me when it’s been so long since I’ve been able to support you. But this would change my life, in a really special way, and when I explained that it was primarily financial reasons that have stopped me from creating comics, a lot of you asked if you could help. So…I have some hope!
Boggle’s Patreon is here, if any of you can find a way to help me bring our owl back!
ليست ناقصه ليكملها الرجل و ليست عورة ليسترها رجل. هي من تلد نصف المجتمع و تربي النصف الآخر.
She is not incomplete to be made whole by a man, and she is not a disgrace to be covered by a man. She is who births one half of society and raises the other. (via 3afra)
(via Han Koehle): This photo is usually divorced from its specific content. It is the most famous image of Nazi book burning. Most people assume the specific books don’t matter. The horror is at the notion of destroying books, any books, which I can certainly understand. But let’s talk about what was in them anyway.
This image shows Nazi-aligned vigilantes (not, incidentally, government agents) destroying the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. Hirschfeld was the founder of modern transgender theory, and it is his displaced students who founded transgender advocacy in the US. Destroying this library destroyed the first central hub of transgender advocacy in the world. This loss is not an inconvenience. Parts of that library can never be replaced.
In the 1910s Earl Lind read one of the books from that library and wrote for a feminist magazine that mothers ought to raise their trans children according to their endorsed gender (as Lind said, their “mental sex”). One hundred years ago there was a movement to normalize trans people. It was based on scientific study and the assertion that a just society should be based on logical evidence, and logical evidence showed that gender variance was perfectly natural and perfectly healthy. That movement is what was displaced when Nazis stormed the library and burned all the books they found.
We recovered from the loss of Hirschfeld’s collection, eventually. We are once again at a place where people write to feminist journals extolling parents (no longer mothers!) to raise their trans children according to the genders of their hearts. But suppressing trans existence is so visible at the heart of the party that just came to power in this country. We’ll see what happens next.
I think it’s a huge and irresponsible oversight to not say how Hirschfeld and sexology in general were attacked by the Nazis because Hirschfeld and many of his students were Jewish…
“ In August, 1968, the country was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King four months earlier, and the race riots that followed on its heels. Nightly news showed burning cities, white flight, radicals and reactionaries snarling at each other across the cultural divide.
“A brand new children’s show out of Pittsburgh, which had gone national the previous year, took a different approach. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood introduced Officer Clemmons, a black police officer who was a kindly, responsible authority figure, kept his neighborhood safe, and was Mr. Roger’s equal, colleague and neighbor.
“Around the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to join him in soaking their tired feet in a plastic wading pool. And there they were, brown feet and pasty white feet, side by side in the water. Silently, contemplatively, without comment.
“25 years later, when the actor playing Officer Clemmons retired, his last scene on the show revisited that same wading pool, this time reminiscing. Officer Clemmons asked Mr. Rogers what he’d been thinking during their silent interlude a quarter century before. Fred Rogers’ answer was that he’d been thinking of the many ways people say “I love you.”
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