Moving slowly

After all the hard work from cast and crew the final performance of Babes in the Wood was last night. This means I have no more excuses; I need to get on with Reflections and with some new prints.

I made a mock up for the tunnel book

And tried making the pieces using gelli printing for texture

And overlaid them to see how it worked

I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to include more of the tree foliage, that the card stock I used was too thin and that I might be better off painting rather than printing the colour.

I think I'd quite like to do it as collagraph but there isn't time

Finally Finished

I’ve finally finished “Voices from the Lockout”

I had been intending to make a box covered with white cotton book cloth to house it in but decided instead to make a wrap out of recycled cotton cloth. I thought that the mills girls would probably carry their sewing wrapped in a similar fashion in order to keep it clean. 

My husband turned the scroll rods for me. The ends reference cotton bobbins from the mills.

This weekend I’ve also been to the September meeting of the North West Book Artists. We made miniature fishbone books and discussed future projects. There was a train strike and it turned into a bit of a trek getting back but it was worth it. It’s good to meet and share with other book makers. 

I also spotted an interesting book structure whilst browsing pinterest. I can’t find it again but I think it was called an Australian reverse piano hinge binding and I think it was credited to Alisa Golden (if I’ve got that wrong I appologise). I had a go at making it using some gelliprints I made last summer. 

The double spreads are cut in the middle of the centre fold and put over the mountain folds of an accordian pleated spine. They are locked in place with a strip of paper pushed through the accordian pleat.

 I like this structure. I'm thinking of adapting it for one of the NWBA projects. 

(I have no idea what blogger is doing to my font sizes!) 

Books, letters and digging

Art work has slowed down somewhat these past couple of weeks. I said that I was going to the allotment to draw but so far I’ve been clearing edges, helping to sort out accumulated rubbish from inside and behind the shed (two trips to the tip, a third one pending) and liberating rhubarb, raspberry canes and fruit bushes. It is starting to look a lot less like an overgrown field so I’m hoping for some of the predicted sun next week and some sketching. In the meantime here is self portrait with shed (after clearing)

I have managed to cut and fold the pages for Artists Books #20 (?)

And I’ve made a bit of a start on the next project that is happening in conjunction with the Lancashire Archives. The subject this time is The Preston Lockout.  (A brief history can be found here)

I’m not sure what I want to make yet but I’ve been playing with wooden type.

  I’m wondering what will happen if I print it on cotton.

Etching and “?”

I’m enjoying this hopping around.

On the etching front I spent yesterday biting the plate but didn’t have time to print it. The gelli plate printed textures seem to have bitten but until it’s inked next week I won’t know if I left them in the copper sulphate long enough to get a good print from them.

 Moving on to the books. 

Both sides of the ‘pages’ in the book structure will be visible so I’ve been experimenting with colouring both sides of the paper.  I can get two books out of an A2 sheet. 

I’ve made plain using a palette knife

 And patterned using the gelli plate

 I thought the plain was too plain and decided to try out the structure with the patterned sheet. When I cut the page shapes out I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like the stripes with the circles. One of them had to go. 

The circle print was nice but it took several layers of cutting up stencils and peeling the stencils off the block because they kept sticking. OK for a one off but not for the 5 sheets I’ll need for an edition. So I overprinted the circles with a plainer texture to give a contrast of plain and patterned on the two sides of the paper.

And cut and folded. Trying to decide whether to have plain or patterned in the inside of the forms.

At this stage I was thinking that I’d stitch the two pieces together but then I wondered what would happen if I cut and slotted it together like I did with the mock ups. So I tried with some of the plain paper.

 I like the way the colour moves from the inside to the outside of the form (though I’m not sure about the holes). I need paper with some contrast between the two sides to accentuate this. I’ve cut strips from textured wallpaper to get some coherence between the pages of the edition and and I’ve started printing using different palettes.

More playing

I often worry that I’m a bit of a dabbler, starting something, moving on, a new technique here, a different project there, not much staying power. 

But after many years of trying to focus, be organised and follow one thing at a time I’ve decided that it’s time to stop trying to force it.  Dabbling is the way I work best, starting several things at once and dipping in and out, exploring and playing, until at last something is finished.  So from now on I’m going to go with the flow and enjoy the process.

At the moment I’m flitting from the medieval book to a book swop book, from a collagraph to an etching and, to add to the mix, props, scenery and other assorted stuff for Peter Pan which our group will put on in June. 

So in the spirit of dabbling this week I’ve played with etching and looked at more book structures.

I wanted the puppets to have different patterned dresses. I decided that I’d like to take these from real fabrics or lace. I want three different patterns on this plate but I find it difficult to get a consistent result with soft ground etching. Pondering different solutions I wondered if it was possible to print the texture onto the aluminium plate using a gelli plate. It is.

These are a bit grey but have real possibilities 

I think I’ve come up with a possible solution for “?”. It will be a book, in that it will have a binding and open like a book, but once open it won’t have a narrative and will be more of a structural object.  I spent a pleasant afternoon cutting and sticking paper (a good use for old play scripts) exploring different structures.

Baker’s Dozen Completed

Just before Christmas I spotted a call for entry for the Liverpool Book Fair. They are running an exhibition at the Liverpool library alongside the book fair. The theme of the exhibition is Frankenstein (the book is 200 years old in 2018). I started playing with ideas, one of which meant constructing interlocking spirals. Though I’d never used it before I thought about using a wire edged binding to make up sections of the spirals.

I was short of a book for my ‘baker’s dozen’ challenge and thought exploring this construction might kill two birds with one stone. I made gelli prints using circles, rectangles and triangles as a starting point for the motifs and using the three process colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) plus white to keep the colour scheme simple.

This week I cut 24 ‘pages’, attached the wire edging and started to assemble them

 I started using embroidery thread which looked ok but half way through, when I was seeing how many different ways I could fold the books, I realised the knots were coming undone.

So I had a go with thin copper wire. This was more secure and I like the look of it better.

 I made four sets of 6 pages...

 then combined these into two sets of 12 (though I may separate one of these back into two again).

These books don’t have a front and back cover so I decided that they needed a box to protect them.

Then later in the week I went to HBP and printed up the type I’d set before the holidays.

Each one looks unbalanced as single prints but they are designed to be cut down and made into a small book. It seems an appropriate way of presenting the text (which is a quote from Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge).

So now last year’s challenges are completed (more or less),  the Christmas decorations are packed away and it’s time to move on into the New Year and see what that brings.