At Yabbers on Wednesday we had a great gathering and tried out my workroom for the first time fitting nine of us in without too much trouble, well it was a bit squeezy if anyone wanted to move around. Tricia had sourced some instructions for making a sewing frame from an encyclopaedia so we started the day by making a frame each. I have just found out that the book it came from was Making & Keeping Creative Journals by Suzanne Tourtillott. It was really quite simple, it just involved cutting a window in the cover of the book and using clamps to hold it open and to hold the cords taut.
These pictures give you a good idea of how it works though I am getting a bit frustrated with the new editing in the blog, I want to move the pictures around but am having great difficulty so I'll leave them all down the left.
Here is the sample book sewn but no covers yet.
After a late lunch we tried out backing silk with paper following the directions given by Dineke McLean at the Papermakers of Victoria meeting last Saturday. Ursula had brought along some pieces of silk that she'd dyed so we tried that out and backed it onto some shoji screen paper that I'd bought on Monday.
The silk is pasted to the paper which was pasted to a sheet of perspex so that it would dry flat, I fully intend trying some more myself but will definitely start small because I suspect it will take a bit of getting used to manouvering the wet paper onto the cloth with only two hands, we had at least four on Wednesday.
I have spent the rest of the week framing up some A2 pulp paintings at Do Your Own Framing. I did their course about five years ago and tend to do most of my framing at home using Ikea frames and cutting my own mounts but these ones were very big so it was much better to do it there and use their equipment and benefit from their expertise. Now I must get back to editing the IAPMA Bulletin.
