Christmas bookswap, Art at Burnley Harbour, Recipe and workshops

I have finished my books for Papermakers of Victoria's book swap and will post off this week before I go to Tassie, they are in the theme of my workshop too being quite sculptural. All made by pouring recycled pulp through a tin can with both ends removed. I then pressed lightly then rolled onto lace on fibro cement. I made the little bags the same way, getting two out of one A4 sheet.

The book can be hung from a Christmas tree.

In the last few weeks I have been working on a series of pulp paintings directly onto canvas, this one is for the exhibition at 69 Smith Street Gallery called Recipe (30 Nov to 18 Dec 2011) so includes the first couple of recipes from my falling apart PMWU basic cookbook.

Recipe ?

The other works are for the Contemporary Art Society exhibition Art at Burnley Harbour, December 2-4.

Vessel 3

Vessel 2

Vessel 1

Small vessel 1 (trial attaching paper and writing)

Small Vessel 2 (includes pineapple fibre as well as recycled)

In preparation for my Tassie workshop over the weekend I trialled doing solar printing with acrylic paints, I got some nice effects but also had problems with the things sticking to the paper. I have done it in the past very successfully using the paper dyes that I use for colouring my papers but since my notes said dyes or acrylic paints I thought I should try the acrylics. The method is to soak the paper (I used 130gsm cartridge) then tip off most of the water place flat things on and cover with plastic wrap the put in the sun to dry.

This is the back of a piece that was dried between two pieces of plastic wrap.

I used lace, leaves and a few plastic bits and pieces and am hiding all the spots where the paper came away with the items.

I had planned to pack for the workshop today since I'm out most of tomorrow at Women's Art Register then on Wednesday Yabbers is here and I'm going to be showing what I learned at Liz Powell's workshop the weekend before last. We won't have time to do the whole thing since the workshop was two very full days and we have less than a day but we can make a start. I liked the design process of continually simplifying the design. We started with a section of a photo that we drew up to twice the size and used the lines to form our key plate. Then we divided the plate into areas and made a collograph using different material for each area. Then we drew our collograph and carved it into lino using the different lino tools manipulated in different ways. then finally we made a jig saw on a fresh piece of lino using our last design.

The lino and collographs

The photograph and design

The prints, many still in progress

Four of my favourites, the idea is to overlay all four prints and gradually build up a multi coloured image, I found the registration quite tricky and the most I printed was three but I mostly preferred the single prints. I quite like the lower left which was the jigsaw with one of the collographs that stuck to the paper and pulled the colour away.

Today's solar prints, I'm really happy with this one, the paint was very thin when I put it on and it hardly stuck at all just a little bit where the larger circles are, that was a piece of rubber, the engine and the bus are flat glow in the dark toys that are plastic, the dots near the bottom are from a piece of lego and the letter A is wood.

The red wasn't quite as thin, I put more paint on and it stuck a bit to the star. So the trick is to use very thin acrylic paint. Now to get off the computer and pack a few things.

Blurb, Libris and Yabbers

I was on Channel 31 the other week in the program Blurb http://www.blurbtvshow.com/#home. I haven't seen it yet but I'm hoping my brother has taped it for me. A friend of a friend saw it and contacted my friend, so I know it's been on.


I finally found out the other day that my book has been shortlisted for the Libris Awards, I hadn't heard anything and figured I'd missed out but when I saw a listing the other day my name was there. I suspect there might be something wrong with my info@gailstiffe.info email. A while ago I also heard that a couple of my books were accepted into the Lark Books production 500 Handmade Books.

In the last month I have made a few things and I got the rest of the vessels back from the Basket exhibition at Artisan Books. Here are the ones that were in that show. Only the large one has any weaving as such so they can barely be called baskets but Daniel was quite happy to have them in the show. They are made from a range of plant fibre papers all of them natural colours except for the red which has been dyed with Cartesol dyes.

I also made some more simple sketch books for St Lukes Art Supplies. This time I used recycled board that I dyed black and leather thonging to hold it all together.


For our next Yabbers session we are planning to do some solar printing. I thought I'd better do some practise samples to make sure my dyes would work. I made a couple of long strips and some rectangles on 150 gsm Cartridge paper, the same paper I used in the sketch books. The process is to wet the paper well then drop the dyes on, spray with a bit of metallic acrylic paint, then drop flat things on to the surface and cover with glad wrap and put in the sun to dry.

Some of the things I used were some young tree fern and geranium leaves and some of my flat plastic shapes that I have for embossing. I'm always checking out $2 shops and the like for glow in the dark shapes, you can get quite a range but they only appear for a short time then something else takes their place. The fern and the plastic shapes worked best but I did get some nice effects from the glad wrap with the geranium leaves. I photocopied one of the sheets onto some handmade paper and used it for the covers of the two demo models I made for my book class on Friday. We did a straight concertina then a concertina with pockets. I used the strip I'd made for the straight concertina and plain Cartridge for the pockets.

I'm considering I might make a set of the pocket books for the Christmas book exchange V is organising for Papermakers. At an earlier Yabbers gathering we made things from paperclay using B's moulds and I made six of each thing thinking I'd use them for the Christmas books. Now I just need to come up with a way to link Christmas with cupids, wings, masks, columns and fish????????? My thinking cap is ON.