And more fun with paste

This evening darling daughter and I spent an hour in the studio making paste paper, but before we got to the paste we had to clear the table and we admired the patterns left by the debris in the ferrous sulphate and caustic soda trays!
























Then we had some more fun. It was hard dragging darling daughter down there with me (she'd have preferred to watch TV but she's not allowed to do that on school nights because she has mean, mean parents) but once she'd started her first piece of paper she was hooked. We agreed that this might be another crafty thing to do with kids on my craft workshops. I foresee lots of mess in my future....

A day in the studio

I'm still flapping about trying to figure out what I want to do for my BookArtObject projects, as well as having intermittent panic attacks about my big exhibition later on in the year. As a result of sitting down with a piece of paper and writing a list in an attempt to get my head around both situations I realised that I NEEDED to spend some time just experimenting in the studio.






















I've been thinking about materials for the BookArtObject text by Jeanette Winterson - just in the sense of what I need, what I currently have that is sufficient to make up 15 books, and how to make up the difference, and I realised that I don't have enough book cloth for what I'm contemplating and that I therefore need to come up with another solution: paste paper. I'd never done it before but after raiding the internet for recipes and advice I made up some paste yesterday, and applied it to lots of paper today. I still have lots of thinking to do about the design elements I would like to incorporate, but meanwhile I had LOTS of fun making patterns! Although you probably can't see it, there is an elegant mixture of greys and silver in the above photo.

















Recently I posted a comment on Fiona Dempster's blog Paper Ponderings about the lovely rusted paper she makes and uses in her work, and Fiona was kind enough to send me a recipe sheet by return email! So my other experiments today had me dipping sections of different papers into three trays of cold, strong tea, ferric sulphate and caustic soda to see what happens...




















The answer is, of course, that I had lots more fun, and the paper isn't bad, either.