My Tree Book Experience

Over the past 3 months, my classmates and I have been working on our tree books. During a ‘normal’ school year the 6th graders would have done hero books, but my class got to do tree books.you may be really confused and asking, what is a tree book? and what was the process like? let me tell you about it!

Throughout this whole experience we got to work with the amazing  Peg Gignoux https://gignouxart.com/ I have actually worked with Ms. Peg before so that connection was already there!The first piece we worked on was screen printing were we essentially printed words all over card board pieces that would later become the actual tree part and the cover for out books. After that we got into the paper folding, which was creating the base of our books. This part was really tedious apposed to the screen printing were we were encouraged to ‘go crazy’ but with the folding it was really in line, one bad move and there’s no going back.

The next part of our tree book process was Akua ink. Personally this was definitely my favorite part. For this we got to bring in leaves and flowers or really whatever we found outside, then we brought them in. We used ink made out of water,and a gel pad and  a roller. We would place the ink down and spread it on the gel pad. Then we would place something from what we found outside on the gel pad. Then the paper would go down and we would use the roller and roll all over the paper. In the end, we got some really beautiful pieces. When we came back next we were working directly on the inside of our tree books. We cut and glued a lot of pieces of our akua ink in the inside.

We later put pockets on the inside. They were for when we added out pieces of poetry in. In all I think that writing the poems was my favorite part. I’ve been told by many people that my writing is really good and quite personally writing is in my blood and it just comes easy to me. The pieces we wrote were ‘Salute to my roots’ were we wrote about people in our family who we look up to and or we are like. We also wrote ‘life lists’ as well as a ‘ when this is over’ poem where we wrote about all the things we took for granted and miss because of covid 19 and what we all learned because of this experience. The last piece was “my wish’ which was a more in depth life list were we wrote at least two wishes we had for the future.

We are currently reading the book Wishtree by Katherine Applegate. So far this book doesn’t seem like a roller coaster book but more of a chill book opposed to the previous book we read this year.

Our books were on display at the Frank Gallery in Chapel Hill https://www.frankisart.com/ . Having some of my art work up in a museum was a real confident booster. My favorite part about this whole experience was the fact that I could share this experience with my mom and dad.

(From left to right)Me,Mom,Dad and Ms.Peg

I was really exited and nervous because in my salute to my roots. I wrote about my mom and dad! I am so happy I got to share this with my parents and when I got my book back the next week I read my writing to my siblings who I also wrote about! Thank you so much Ms.Peg for helping my classmates and me with this!!!

Adios,

Leila N.