ornament books

On reading Wendy's http://quirkyartist.blogspot.com/ and Lee Kotner's
http://leekottner.typepad.com/blogorrhea_ii/2007/12/ornament-books.html
http://www.paperstudiodemos.blogspot.com/ blogs about ornament books I was reminded of a book I recieved in a Christmas book swap back when I first joined the online community. It was made by Raven Regan Arts and Crafts in Canada. It was made the same way as the book on Lee's site but had several pages and a bead closure.

That lead me to make a few variations on the theme.

Starting with squares, the pictured book is made from printouts of a snowflake clip art. The clipart had one side blue on white and the other white on blue. When joined together the book has one side blue snowflake on white and the other white snowflake on blue. I made six pages but I think it would have been better with five. The bead on the ribbon holds the book closed and will hold the covers together when the book is open and can be used to hang the book either open or closed.

This is another variation with shaped pages. There are lots of possibilities for this book, here are just a few.

Back in 1998 I made a series of blue pineapple books which were explosion concertinas. I only had a small amount of the pineapple fibre so made lots of small sheets from plain pineapple fibre and indigo dyed fibre, the darker indigo dyed paper was made from pineapple tops and the rest was from fibre imported from the Phillipines.

Another day at the computer

This will be a short post since I don't want to spend another day at the computer, my family is getting jack of me sitting here all the time. I was going to do so much else on Tuesday and must do more today. Anyway I spent a bit of time updating my website http://www.gailstiffe.info/ yesterday. I figured I only had work I had done in February on the site so I selected a few of my favorite pieces to represent the year.

Christmas Cards and creativity

I have just spent over an hour reading emails in between looking at blogs and there's so much more I could read but I promised myself I'd catch up on the washing, dishes and try to do a bit of a tidy up. I'm looking forward to a very uncreative day, I've packed away my papermaking gear and drained the pulp. I have only one more project to complete before the end of the year and that is to get some denim beaten for some friends, I promised it to them months ago but then my beater stopped working, in fact it is now in pieces, so I guess the first thing I need to do is get it back together, I'm afraid I've put that in the too hard basket. I'll see if I can hire Papermakers of Vics beater this week and then put my mind to getting mine fixed, I might need to hire a handy man.



I feel very relieved I finally posted out all the IAPMA (http://www.iapma.info/) bulletins, I've been working on them since 1 September, got them back from the printers about 3 weeks ago and apart from the first night have put covers on and samples in over 350. The paper for the covers was sent from Scotland months ago and I sent J one of my Bundoora books in exchange for the postage costs, I hope she's happy with it. My next editing job is the IAPMA newsletter, then the Women's Art Register Bulletin. The newsletter should only take a couple of days but the Register Bulletin will take a little longer, I didn't have much for it but I've chased up a couple of articles and have extended the deadline to mid January. On my way to Portland last weekend I called into the Warrnambool Art Gallery and saw a couple of shows, I was very taken by an exhibition by Katherine Bowman which was black and white figures, almost just suggestions of figures but when you looked closely small sections were beaded. I bought a copy of the catalogue and was able to contact Katherine re including her work in the forthcoming bulletin, she pointed me in the direction of Craft Culture http://www.craftculture.org/Review/rbarry4.htm where there is a review of the exhibition and sent me some images for the bulletin. I'm also hoping to include an article on Bronwyn Oliver, her work was on the cover of our second bulletin back in 1988 and not since then. Given her untimely death last year I thought it might be time to feature her work again.



I have been doing a little bit of creative work lately. The time came to make Christmas cards, it's go so that each year more people expect handmade cards from me. This year I've taken a bit of an easy way out, instead of handmade paper as the base card I've used watercolour paper. When I did the card class I discovered a shop in Croydon that sold books of 280 gsm watercolour paper for $10, there were fifteen A3 pages so I was able to get 60 cards from one book. It wasn't very good quality for watercolours but fine for cards with a rough and a smooth side. I got a bit carried away and made over 60 cards (I've bought 3 books all up). Here are pictures of four of them, the others are all similar, just variations on a theme. It all started with the scraps from my Christmas books, I just added a bit of paper which had been sprayed with a bit of gold acrylic and with strong red dye.


Now I really must get off the computer!

Kinder Kids

I'm just recovering from two days of teaching 3 and 4 year olds to make paper. I've put in pictures of the paper from the first day drying in my shed. I made A5 sheets with the 3 year old group and A4 with the older group. They all made three sheets, one plain, one with stencilled foot or paw prints and one with a hand print. All bar one child made their three sheets, many of them unassisted. By the end of the second day I had everything going swimmingly, I had only one helper so split the class into four groups of five or six each child had a name tag which they placed on their last sheet. I had six couching beds and left the sheets in place until all of the children had finished then I picked the stacks up and put them in the press all at the same time, calling the children back to see the water being squeezed out. In the previous sessions I picked up all the sheets after each group had finished and made the children wait while I pressed the sheets, they did like to help turning the handle of the press but it worked much better if they could just make their three sheets then go inside to do something else. Something else I streamlined over the two days was that first I was giving the children a choice between a hand print and a foot print but it worked out better if they did one of each but swapped the colours of the base sheets and second sheet.



I was totally whacked after two days leaning over low tables. Hence a morning sitting at the computer before I get stuck into my next project which is making some special cards for one of my neighbours. One pastel, one bright and one with plenty of bling, lets see how I go.


Then a visit to my mum via refilling my gas bottle so I can finish cooking fibres for the workshop I'm running next Saturday in Portland (about 4hrs drive from home). I found out last Friday that there are 15 enrolled in the class so I'll need plenty of fibre.

That Christmas Book

Well, I've done the Christmas books, finished them off at about midnight last night. I decided to go for something abstract. Not very Chrismassy many would say especially since I've chosed black and white for the colours. Since I had the Roman columns I decided to go with Roman numerals for the date. The tree on the cover is one of the moulds I've been using for the Christmas cards this year. I think everyone will be getting a collage card on watercolour paper this year.

See the pictures below.

I've been teaching some classes the last few weeks, three weeks of bookbinding and one of card making for Christmas. Next week I'm going to a Kindergarten to make paper with lots of three and four year olds. I'm going to have to get busy making pulp, the weeks seem to fill up so quickly.