What a difference …

a good night’s sleep makes! [Plus having a day at home and not too many chores.]

I did a little collaging – Quality Control and friends [she is, of course, the one who’s out of step],

 

 

 

 

 

and a little kirigami. These aren’t from my calendar, which is a bit neglected at the moment, they are all my own work. This is actually a pocket in the collage sketchbook, hence the diagonal line.

 

Then, inspired by this post, I took this, which had been hanging around for years – possibly decades – and tried to make it a bit more interesting.

[Mmm – just Googled CPC and out of dozens of possible sources, my money’s on the electronics firm, which would mean it used to belong to Cheese Major. Unless it was one of the many government initiatives which came, went and sank without trace during the years Wensleydale and I worked in education.]

But I digress. Unlike Hanna’s original, I started with the cover. A bit of fossicking turned up an experimental piece from the summer - painted iron-on interfacing ironed-on to some rather bright hand-dye. The ends are different because the interfacing was smaller than the hand-dye.

So I free machined it, going round the shapes in the paint in whatever colour took my fancy. [I’ve decided the only way I’m going to gain confidence in FME is by just doing it, in situations where I don't much care what it ends up like!]

 

 

 

Hanna added end papers to her planner, and I was going to do the same till I found this – a bit of paper bag printing on poly satin, bonded to more hand-dye and embroidered. I never knew quite what to do with it, so it went in the front of the binder, with an offcut of the outer cover at the back – end textiles. I stuck them down with double sided tape, but the cover is sewn, with pockets to slip over the covers.

I wasn’t sure about the painted interfacing when I first did it, but today, every time I pressed it, it got softer and more like a rather bizarrely coloured suede. Nice.

Then I tackled the inside. The binder is an odd size, just too small to take A4 paper, so everything had to be cut down to fit.

 

 

These are the dividers, made from an old calendar. I’m not usually a flowery calendar person, but this one was free…

I added some lined paper, cutting down some with two punched holes which won’t go into the four ring binder I take to college.

Now I need to decide what to do with it. Hanna made hers as a planner, and heaven knows I could do with one of those, but I can’t find any printable planner pages on the net that make any sense to me at all.  Maybe I’ll have to wake up my dormant form-constructing skills, and see what I can make for myself.

Cutting and sticking.

Having spent the best part of an insomniac night making a basket which ended up in the bin this morning, I decided to play around with collage this afternoon.

I was inspired by a statement in one of BBC4’s art programmes, that contemporary art seeks to convey the artist’s feelings [I paraphrase]. That led to a discussion of how you convey ‘confused and uncertain’.

So after reading up automatic drawing [which led to some very odd websites], and wanting to play with my graphics pad – I tried to draw ‘confused and uncertain’.

It certainly wasn’t automatic, because after the first few tentative wobbles, I was thinking about it.

Looks like archipelagos to me.

 

Today I collaged some archipelagos – and some negative archipelagos. This was a piece of paper with a rather odd pattern on it, that had been hanging around waiting for its time to come. I think they need a bit of computer manipulation to make them more interesting.

That led to another experiment, with a piece of painted disposable tablecloth [can’t remember why I painted a disposable tablecloth – it may have had something to do with Creative Sketchbooks], some Bondaweb and some hand-dyed fabric. 

These two I really like – although I think I may have been under the influence of the hyperbolic coral reef at the time.The tablecloth bonded to the fabric really well [or it did when I remembered to take the release paper off], and the texture shows up well. These may get some stitch – when I can decide what sort.

 

Following on the theme of collaging my computer ‘drawings’ – this 

 

 

 

 

 

 

morphed into these two  -sort of.

 

 

The base of these was a scrumpled, painted, paper bag, [I think – it’s a long time since I did it]. Not sure about the dimensional paint on the one above, but - ‘they're only samples’. I wish I’d scanned the bag before I cut it up.

 

 

 

I did also fulfil my promise to try making kirigami in Sumopaint – but I think that may be another post.