No muse is good muse?

Er- I think not.

Perhaps after tomorrow – when we are going on a life drawing class – and the Cheese Minors’ move should, finally, take place – my muse will return. [By the way, thanks for all the kind comments about their move – much appreciated.]

Not that I haven’t been busy. We have had a visit from Babybel and her dog, so her mum and dad could have time to sort stuff – and then took her up to Mr & Mrs Cheddar, our co-grandparents, for their turn.

So art did take place – it just wasn’t mine. 

 

I did manage to finish my version of this - which is not nearly as small as it appears in the photo. It stretches.

A nice, straightforward pattern if you have a few balls of mohair looking for  a home – mine took exactly 3 50gm balls.

And I have spent a happy afternoon weeding clothes which no longer fit out of the wardrobe. Happy because although I’ve had to junk quite a lot [or send them to the charity shop, if they are still wearable] it’s because they are too big, not too small. And that is a very nice feeling.

Mind you, it is Babybel’s daddy’s birthday on Monday so by the time we’ve been to the house warming/birthday bash - [fish and chips, champagne  and birthday cake are not the most slimming choices] I may need to dig those bigger jeans out of the charity shop bags…

I haven’t died

or gone on holiday – just been worrying about my children. Babybel’s mum and dad have been involved in the house removal from hell – we’ve had some rocky moves but theirs has been far far far worse than anything we have ever experienced. I know moving house seems to bring out the worst in otherwise quite pleasant people, but they have been mucked about by everyone else in the chain, and their buyer makes Scrooge look like a spendthrift.

It all seems to be resolved now [fingers crossed] – apart from the move on Monday…

It’s a great move from our point of view because Babybel [and her mum and dad of course] will only be 30 minutes drive away, instead of 3 times as long, and a much nicer drive too. And we get to look after her one day a week, although I suspect that is going to take a bit of getting used to…

But all of this long distance worrying has got in the way of my creativity, so very little has been achieved, since it all began to look as if it was going pear-shaped. Of course, there was nothing we could do while their buyer shilly shallied, and it is so hard to deal with your children’s problems if you can’t kiss them better!

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Ophidiophobics, look away now.

although slow-worms aren't actually snakes, as I’m sure you know, but  lizards.

It passed by while we were sitting outside this afternoon, slowly enough for me to get my camera and chase off Quality Control, who was very interested.

It has been such a nice day that I wore my sun hat, so I apologise in advance for any change in the weather. Somehow when the sun shines, and I have a clear afternoon, I feel the urge to sit outside and draw. This is a concertina book – 7 simple drawings and a title [to be added] – perhaps ‘leaves from my overgrown and snake infested garden’?

I also made this, inspired by this. I have spurts of collecting security envelopes, as there is a wide variety of patterns and you can use them for book pages, but at the moment I don’t have many, so the choice was a bit boring. In fact I find the whole thing a bit boring.

 

 

So I decided to try different found paper [sorry about the reflected flash – no idea why I got it in one but not the other]. These bits came from a Saga holiday brochure  -so there is a ‘summer’ connection! The result is more to my taste – I like those jazzy hands and arrows, punched from headings.

 

 

And finally – I ripped up some of the less successful collagraphs and monoprints and made a landscape. 

So I think I’ve reached 72 ‘drawings’ – must count them some time to check! What will I do when I reach 100? Keep going? Or collapse in a relieved heap? Only time will tell…

On a non-drawing related topic - I fished the hot water bottle books out from under my old Singer – but although their tendency to flip open has been curbed a bit, they are still a bit unruly – but fun.

I’m in love …

with Wensleydale, of course – but also with collagraphs. [Or possibly collographs, there seems to be some disagreement.] Whichever it is, there is more information and some good examples here. I’ve wanted to try collagraphs for years, so the 100 drawings was an opportunity to get off my back side and actually make some.

So here are mine. Look, I’m just beginning, right? None are good enough to be one in a hundred - although I might cut up some of those leaves and make a collage. But I am really excited by the process.

Being me, I worked from two sets of instructions – one set by Jane Wild from the last WOW, and one set by Heidi Miracle-McMahill from an old edition of Quilting Arts. I used paper for these try-outs, but I’ll move on to fabric when I've got some more carpet tape.

Miracle-McMahill suggests using fun foam to make the print plates – the ordinary type for the base, and the self adhesive type for the collage.  The two plates on the left were made like this. I wondered if they would stay stuck together in use, but they did – even those small dots on the plate in the centre [well, all but one]. The disadvantage of this method is that you have a limited range of textures available – although I happened to have some fun foam which is sort of sandy textured, which I used for the leaves on the centre plate. For the other plates [only 1 shown here] I used a variety of textured papers and fabrics, stuck on to card with carpet tape and sealed with diluted PVA.

Wild suggests using a pasta machine as a press – you make a sandwich of the inked plate, some damp paper, and a piece of felt and roll it through the pasta machine. This of course limits the size you can work with – which is why the plates are long and narrow. I found the size quite restrictive and by the end was printing by hand twice on one sheet of paper. I also found that you needed good paper with the pasta-press – thinner papers crumpled or stuck to the plate – or both. I wanted to experiment with papers – emulsion painted paper of different types, backs of envelops, failed monoprints, etc. Didn’t tell you about the failed monoprints did I? – that's how failed they were - but much improved by being cut up and collagraphed on.

If you Google collagraphs you’ll find that some people say you must use a press, others say you can do it by hand. I felt I got just as good results [sometimes better] with hand pressure – but a bit of further research suggests it depends what you want to print. If you want to print the surface of the collage, hand pressure, or rubbing with a spoon or a baren, may be enough. If, on the other hand, you want to print the edges and gaps between the raised areas, you will need a lot more pressure [and a wiped plate]. Some sources suggest putting the sandwich between two pieces of board and standing on it – or omitting the boards and driving over it …

That’s probably more than you want to know about collagraphs – but if, like me, you like a touch of the unexpected in your work and have lots of textured bits and bobs lying around, they are fun to try.

Just don’t put the print sandwich though any roller of the pasta machine except the one for making lasagne. Ask me how I know.

In my defence, I've never actually used a pasta machine to make pasta – I got mine on freecycle to use with Fimo and I’ve never used it for that either. But yes, it was stupid!

I also made some books. The green  one is a little accordion with pockets, made out of one of those failed monoprints.

The other two are based on a book in Re-bound I said I’d never make. But I was fossicking around in the airing cupboard for something else -and found a redundant hot water bottle…

I changed the fastening because I couldn't get rivets through the thickness of the rubber – but that means that everything but the thread is recycled – old hot water bottle for the cover, recycled packaging for the pages and the ties.

Yes, they're odd – but fun odd! They don’t close easily, but I’ve put them under a lot of weight overnight to see is that helps.

Our current hot water bottles are a much nicer colour and much more interesting patterns. Wensleydale got quite worried when I started inspecting them …

And finally – I haven’t completely neglected the 100 drawings. I’ve been GIMPing and turned this failed bit of land art -

 

 

 

into this – definite improvement. 

55 to 61 in about 11 months.

Or how to cheat on your 100 drawings. [You can achieve quite a lot when your husband is [relatively] immobile and not up to going out.]

When I was tidying up yesterday, I came across this, which resulted from a Contemporary Textiles workshop last September – it’s a scratched black and white photo of a bit of an ‘installation’ which looked  like a flower, with added Inktense pencil.

I’m not beyond a bit of creative recycling, so I decided  to include it in my 100 drawings. But as I had some cartridge paper with scraps of emulsion painted newspaper stuck to it to hand [as you do], I decided to try printing the flower on it.

Which led to this. I like the way the scraps of newspaper add to the shadowy background.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, you will not be surprised to learn, I introduced the printout to the scanner. And printed one of the results on another bit of cartridge + newspaper I had.

Why do my inverted colour scans always come out blue and purple? Not that I’m complaining – I like blue and purple.

 

 

I scanned that version- and printed a grayscale version on – well, fill that bit in for yourselves…

I stopped there, you may be glad to hear – but that brought the tally to 59.

 

 

 

 

No. 60 is a very different flower piece.

I’ve been taking Sharon Boggon’s on-line GIMP class at Joggles, although I'm a bit behind. This is the result of an early class – a photo of cone flowers, posterized, bits selected by colour, and the result printed on black paper painted with Inkaid. I’m very pleased with this, and I think it is very embroiderable.

And no. 61 – a piece which is not of flowers, doesn't have much to do with summer, and is very heavily influenced by the work of Chris Kenny and an anonymous contributor to the somethink collective blog. This is a page from an old road atlas, folded into a book, with sections cut out. Anticlockwise from top left, from fully folded to fully opened. Yes, it does end up upside down!

I can see a lot of possibilities here, for stencils, for example, and abstract pieces. And cutting out the sections was quite a contemplative activity – until the craft knife became uncomfortable to hold.

Yesterday’s post caused a flurry amongst the Chinese porn spam comment merchants – maybe I shouldn’t have used the heading ‘Naughty Granny’?

Naughty granny keeps her promise …

at last.

Several weeks ago, I offered to make one of these for Babybel, who is into dollies – or was then.

And the weeks passed, and I lost the instructions, and I forgot about it – but when I was having a tidy up earlier in the week, I found the print-out – and then I found some fabric – and I felt like doing a bit of straightforward sewing – so here’s my version.

Slightly modified as I had to cut my doll sling according to my cloth, but the instructions were clear and it went together quickly.

So, flushed with success, I decided to make a bag as well, using some similar fabric from the stash and a magazine pattern.

I have ranted written before about my difficulties with a magazine pattern. This one was no better. From the mysterious metre of bondaweb mentioned in the list of materials, which never appeared again, to the ‘you what?’ instructions for the straps, to the downright wrong instructions for sewing up the main bag piece. Not sure if it was badly written in the first place or badly subedited [do sub-editors still exist?] – but if you didn’t have  any experience of making bags you would have ended up very frustrated, and with a back pack with it’s straps on the side rather than the back of the bag.

It is finished, but as with the last one it is an odd size – a backpack which looks as if it is meant for an adult but with straps only long enough for a child. I think it will probably become a toy bag!

Next time you see me tempted by a magazine pattern, warn me off!

Any problems with this are entirely my own fault. It is, as I’m sure you recognise, a knitted book.

I was not so foolish  to think that I was the first person to think of knitting books, but Google only came up with knitted book covers. But then, when I fossicked around Aimee Lee’s website, where I'd gone to drool over her sari book, I found this and this and this - and a lot of other wonderful stuff.

I love the materials Lee uses – not that I want to copy her, but I do think I need to explore other colours and textures. Having said that, mine feels lovely – soft and squishy. More experimentation needed.

It’s definitely not a drawing though.

Going round in circles.

 

I realised after my last post that I hadn’t mentioned our trip out on Friday – so the first circle is posting about Saturday and then going back to Friday …

Our trip was very enjoyable, although it might not have been. We set out to visit this, armed with a grid reference and a printout, dated June, that said it would be in place for about two months. We had an enjoyable drive down to that bit of Wiltshire and drove round in circles trying to find it – without success. [A further Google – which I should have done before we set out, revealed that it has been dismantled :(]

However, in our unsuccessful attempts to find something which no longer exists, we noticed signposts to somewhere which I have been saying we ought to visit for years – ever since I first realised it wasn’t that far away.

 

This is Stourhead, which is every bit as magical as I thought it would be. We managed a circular tour of the lake, but missed out the house, as as we didn’t have the legs for that as well, I took a few photographs of views, trees, flowers, stones and shadows.                

And us. My hips aren’t really that big, I like to believe.

 

So disaster was turned into triumph and we had a great day out, topped off by NT tea and cake, and a visit to the Stourhead Farm Shop – well, we couldn’t resist a sign which promised 31 varieties of cheese. [We only bought 3 – the Partridge Blue is great but we haven’t tried the other two – Smoke Acre and Wyfe of Bath - yet.]

And when I got home I had enough energy left to play around with a few images. The top one is a photo I took at Highcliffe last month. I printed it on newspaper painted with Inkaid [middle image], then scanned it as a black and white image and printed it again on black paper painted with Inkaid. The bottom two will be added to the tally.

I suppose that’s more of a progression than a circle – but the next one I worked with is definitely circular.

 

I don’t think I showed you the top image – an almost proper drawing, starting from a magazine photo, which I made  a few days ago. As usual I scanned it as a negative [second image], and then, as I was in the mood, printed it on black paper and Inkaid [third image]. That one is going into the homework book too – but just to see what happened, I scanned it as a negative again – and it’s almost back to the beginning.

I really like printing on the Inkaid – on the newspaper it makes it stiff enough to go through the printer and partly obliterates what’s underneath, which is good, and on any paper it adds texture to the print. Ever the cheapskate, I’m thinking of trying paper painted or sponged with emulsion paint, to see how that works.

I think that brings the total number of ‘drawings’ up to 55 …