Christmas and blogging

Christmas day at my brother's, the two tables are set, he did a great job of feeding the masses, well twenty of us for the day.

The first table, my 14 yr old niece made the place names.

The second table - the outdoor table was replaced on the deck by the lounge suite. It was lovely sitting out there when we first arrived, but the day served us up the widest range of weather, probably the first ever white Christmas for Melbourne. Not snow but hail. We had to rush around with sheets of black plastic to rescue the lounge suite.

Then the path to the road turned into a swimming pool, just added a bit of excitement to the day, it was lovely to catch up with family and friends.

After fairly limited blogging this year and no catching up with other people's blogs I've had a couple of very relaxing days catching up on blogs. I read a few that I had links from here and realised I hadn't updated my list since I started blogging, today I've done a little of updating but need to do some more. I caught up a bit on Impact 7 which I was sorry to miss out on but was just back from Korea and had lots to catch up on. I have also joined in an exchange with bookartobject organised by Sara Bowen where we make an edition of books based on titles of the 100 short stories in the book 'An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen' written and buried by Sarah Bodman. My group is group four and so far is seven artists from around the world, I have chosen to work with pulp fiction, it seemed the obvious choice for a paper nut! Not sure what I'll do but it will be something with pulp.

Playing with Paste and Paint

I am teaching a workshop at the end of January at Open Drawer in Hartwell, it is going to three days and the theme is sculptural books. It is basically the same as the workshop I ran in Hobart last month and includes a different decorative technique at the start of each day. Included are scraper paper, paste paper and pressure paper. I needed some samples so I made up about 300 ml of cornflour paste by mixing 2 coffee spoons to a paste with cold water then dumping boiling water on and stirring like crazy. I added a teaspoon of glycerine and a drop of detergent because I had them and to aid with the flow of the paste. I then strained this paste into 4 separate containers and coloured one red, one blue, one yellow and one gold with acrylic paints. I proceeded to paste away on dampened 130 gsm cartridge paper. My favourite tools were some adhesive spreaders with different teeth and a credit card. I did try out some stamps that I'd bought and some that I'd cut from erasers and a couple of Indian wooden stamps. I worked on a sheet of brown paper and at the end of the session combed that too.

The brown paper

The first batch of papers

The second batch, I also worked over some earlier ones with different coloured paste and got some great results. At the end of the first session I mixed the red and yellow and the blue and gold and came back the next day to do some more.

Two layers with the wide comb

medium comb and credit card

Credit card

Credit card and ruler

Narrow and medium combs

Wide comb

wide comb

End of fork and hand carved eraser.

I finally finished off the paste this morning and got 50 A4 sheets plus the brown paper from my 2 tablespoons of paste.

I also needed to build up my supply of scraper paper since I used most of my previous stock on my Christmas cards. These are sooo easy to make, just run some acrylic paint along the top of a sheet of paper and scape it down getting it quite thin, an old credit card is good to use as a scraper though you can also use any paint scraper. I first read about this technique on the web but unfortunately didn't keep the reference and don't seem to be able to find it now.

Anyway you run two or three layers of paint on top of each other not allowing them to dry in between and finish up with a metallic, (I mostly use Jo Sonya but other acrylics work fine too) then spray with water and leave for a couple of minutes. Then scrape off the excess water and paint. Not wanting to waste any paint this scraping is usually the start of my next page, the more random the better. This paper can be used for covering books and boxes and for decorating cards.

Napthol red light and opal

Napthol red light, aqua and silver

Brilliant magenta, brilliant green and gold

Napthol red light, burnt umber and copper

Phthalo blue and silver

Tassie trip including Silver showing and workshop

I'm a bit late posting this having been back from Tassie for nearly three weeks, these are a few pictures I took down by the docks in Hobart, one of my favourite haunts.

I went to Hobart to teach a three day workshop on Sculptural Books and here are some results of the workshop. I am teaching the same class again at the end of January at Open Drawer in Hartwell.

Here are some of my books that I took for inspiration.

And the IAPMA Silver exhibition got another showing to the workshop participants and some visitors. I wasn't able to take it all with me just what fitted into two plastic tubs. The next showing is possibly Sydney and then Bairnsdale in August next year.

Christmas Book and card swap

We had our Yabbers breakup on Wednesday and exchanged Christmas cards so here they are.

This one is mine, I was lazy this year and bought a punch and am using up lots of coloured papers that I made for the books I put in 'Opus', the decorative paper (purple and gold) is some scraper paper I made as a sample for my Tassie workshop.

Tricia's star card

Jan's

Antje's using some of the silver star shapes we got from Reverse art a few years ago.

Ursula

Marie white paper with geranium petals

Beverley

Dorothy

The Collection

Last Saturday was the final Papermakers of Victoria meeting for the year and those who participated received their five books that were part of the book swap, there were 17 participants this year who each submitted six Christmas books (this year we were requested to avoid using red and green). One of each book goes to Papermakers archives and each participant receives five books by other people. Here is my collection. I don't know all the artists but will label those I do know.

Jan

Beverly

Tania

Chris

?

The collection.