Impromptu Mosaics and Other Last Minute Gifts

This December I'm finishing up a huge home improvement project which bled over from November and will be completed possibly two days before Christmas. I'm also packing and organizing for a five week trip which commences Christmas Day. I have plenty to keep me busy... but it just doesn't feel like the holidays unless I'm making a few gifts for someone. I don't know if secretly my hand made gifts are met with groans or simply tolerance but for some reason I just have to do it, so if you happen to be the lucky recipient, just take it out when I visit you and pretend it's out all year.

I decided to make something for my fiddle teacher, Beanie O'Dell, who is a fabulous instructor and gifted fiddler. I happened to find these unfinished wooden violin gift plaques on the Shar Music Website ( http://www.sharmusic.com/Shop-Shar/Gifts/Other/Misc/Violin-Gift-Plaque-with-purfling.axd ) and thought they were a good starting point. They were advertised as something that you could sign or draw on and give as a teacher gift. I decided to take a different approach.

I dug out all my pieces of tile and glass, ordered a few little extra tiles, and then lined up my three violin faces, grabbed my Weldbond glue, and started gluing! Each plaque began to take on a personality all its own. By the time I had finished, the three of them were very different.

The glue took about a day to dry and then I mixed up some sanded black grout and grouted them all. I had to do each one individually because the sponging step was laborious with all those little tiny tiles! Once the grout was set, I sealed it with a grout and tile sealer.

Tomorrow I will attach a sawtooth to the back and wrap two of the three plaques. The second one is for my neighbor, another awesome fiddler and the last one is for me to keep so that I can remember how well my anti-stress, "mosaic therapy" worked this holiday season.

And Beanie, you don't have to hang it. Really.

Bahamian Rhapsody

A few weeks ago, I had a delightful mid-winter escape to Andros Island in the Bahamas. It was my first visit and I was amazed at how few people were on Andros, compared with the bustle of the Nassau area. Andros is the largest but one of the least populated island in the Bahamas. There were days when I walked for an hour on an expanse of beautiful tropical beach and never saw another soul.

While there, I was adopted by lovely residents of the area where we were staying. One of our adventures was a trip to a local batik factory in Fresh Creek called Androsia. http://www.androsia.com/ I was so enthralled watching the batik process that we arranged to go back and take a class there. This 'factory' was a big warehouse-type building surrounded by scrub vegetation, where 20 yards of freshly batiked fabric hung next to someone's laundry.

One man who works there has over many years created the most wonderful stamps for making the fabric by developing his own stamping method. He designs and cuts a stamp out of heavy foam rubber and mounts it on a wire frame. The stamp is then dipped into the hot wax and printed onto the long lengths of white cotton fabric. Once it's all stamped, the fabric is dyed in old bathtubs. Then the wax is removed and the fabric hung out to dry. The ladies at the factory make wonderful clothing out of the fabric or you can buy it by the yard and bring it home to make your own.

In our batik lesson, we were given a practice strip and then one yard of fabric on which to make our own Bahamian inspired designs. We were given stamps to use and also a 'tjanting' pen, with which we could write or draw our own pictures. This turned out to be much more difficult than it looked in the demonstration! The ladies I was with then let me choose a color for all our pieces to be dyed, and I chose "Turtle Green", which was as close as I could find to the color of that beautiful Caribbean water.

As a thank you to my kind hosts, I came home and used some of my fabric to make bags, which I will send back to them to remind them of the fun we had one steamy day in the beautiful tropical paradise that is Andros.

Scratching a New Itch

In my constant quest to fight creative boredom, I tried some scratchboard. Instead of planning a design, I sat down with a nice piece of black board and a scratching tool and just started scratching whatever came into my head (as usual, it had to do with food!). There's something much less intimidating about a plain black surface than a plain white page. I also discovered that if you do happen to scratch too much, you can always dab a little black india ink on the spot and scratch again. Once it was all scratched, I used a little watercolor to add the finishing touches.

This piece was really just an experiment but I'm still rather proud of the result. It inspired me to think about illustrating a book or writing my own Zine. I'll explore those ideas more after I go get something to eat!

It Takes a Village

Every time I come across a great idea in a magazine that I want to try, I set it aside for a "rainy day". The other day, I was down in my studio and the house was all torn apart from renovating, the weather was terrible, and there wasn't a darn thing going on and I just decided to pull out some of those rainy day ideas. I came across one from Cloth Paper Scissors Magazine. A printmaker was looking for inspiration and got the idea to make these little houses. Hey, I'm a printmaker, my house renovations are creating lots of 2 x 4" scraps..this could work! A few quick cuts with a miter saw and some rough sanding later, and I had made myself a little wooden village. I then stained each little house with some water based stains. The next step was to take out old linoleum blocks and some wood engravings, and make a few new patterned blocks from EZ cut. I was ready to print. I found some lightweight Japanese printing paper and had a heyday printing all sorts of things on each page. These had to dry overnight. (Luckily, it rained for four days straight! Who'd have thought that would be a good thing?) When the prints dried, I painted them with watercolors and then began the fun part - cutting out pieces and gluing them onto the blocks with matte medium. The process was kind of like decoupage, only quicker. The final step was to seal all the little houses with an acrylic varnish. This project was so much fun that I ended up making a whole little village of houses. Now if anyone can think of a use for a whole village of printed houses, could you please let me know before the next rainy day?

Memory Palaces

I just entered my first show in Asheville. Asheville Bookworks is having its wonderful Bookopolis event this weekend. The theme this year is "Memory Palaces" and I entered my print "Quitting Time". It made it into the extended show and will be displayed until December.

For those of you not familiar with Asheville Bookworks, it is a community studio, school and gallery that is a gathering place for people interested in book arts, letterpress, printmaking, and papermaking. Bookopolis includes an exhibit with 100+ handmade books and prints from artists all over the country, plus letterpress and printing demonstrations. Anyone with an interest in things printed, bound, or otherwise book related should check out this event and this great resource.

New Beginnings

It's a new season (my favorite of the year!) and I'm in a new city, in a new (old) house, and looking for some new inspiration. Between moving (ourselves!) and a daughter and two grandkids into the house, my time for creative outlets has been limited these last few months. Hopefully, that is about to change.

My first opportunity to make something just for fun came this summer when my friend Linda and I decided to make some mosaic birdbaths. I have so much old glass, tile and assorted doo dads to work with that there was no shortage of materials. This project is not for the weak backed person, though, as those birdbaths are heavy and get even heavier when you add ten pounds of glass, tile and cement. The finished products were worth the heavy lifting!

P.S. The glass I used in my birdbath has a reflective quality when filled with water. Birds flee in terror when they get near it. I guess it makes a lovely garden decoration.

A Collagraph is Born

Today I printed my charming little collagraph blocks. I smeared a dull grey glob of etching ink all over those pretty colors, wiping them down with tarlatan (a stiff kind of cheesecloth), rubbing them with my palm, wiping them again with newsprint, and finally running them through an etching press with damp paper. The prints came out looking something like blurry fossils on a rock. I let the prints dry and then painted them with watercolors and they came alive again. I also enhanced the prints with a graphite pencil and a grey colored pencil to make the images stand out. And in the end, I even managed to clean most of the grey ink off the blocks and they are almost as good as new.