Australia all let us rejoice!

Yes folks, I'm now an Australian citizen. Hurrah!


















Pictures of me with the Mayor, Keith Rhoades

It's a slightly weird feeling, getting citizenship of another country, and it does mean a lot. This is the only way in which I have a legal right to stay in the same country as my children. Although I could doubtless spend a long time to-ing and fro-ing on my UK passport with my Permanent Resident's Visa (and unlimited travel), it's more reassuring to know that I have a legal right to re-enter the country rather than the country graciously allowing me back in each time. And I have a sneaky feeling that in these uncertain times it might be useful to have both UK and Australian citizenship. Who knows. But anyway, after jumping through all the bureaucratic hurdles put in place to keep out the undesirables, it's nice to have finally made the grade. I feel honoured and lucky, and you know me, I don't do things half-heartedly: I live here now and so I want to be able to participate and do things like vote. I don't know if I will ever feel that this is truly my home, but I am glad that I am allowed to stay and have equal rights and priviledges to the people who were lucky enough to be born here.

Thanks Keith, even if I do vote you out of office next time there are Council elections!

After the ceremony we went for a celebration breakfast at the Surf Club. My great thanks to Michael, Patrick, Ella, Carol, Julie, Dene, Bronwyn, Willis, Sharon and Flynn who all turned out to congratulate me! Bronwyn and Julie had a great time last Friday shopping for Aussie souvenirs...




















I am the proud recipient of a great big yellow bag of items including, in no particular order, flip-flops (although apparently I now have to call them 'thongs', which is hard after a lifetime of thinking that a thong is a minimalist piece of ladies' underwear), caramello chocolate, 'Milo' (malted milk powder), a pair of salad servers with handles shaped like the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour, 'Aeroplane' brand Mango jelly powder, Tim Tams (dark chocolate-coated biscuits with a chocolate creme centre definitely not like Oreos, if you're reading this as an American citizen - more like a dark choc version of a Penguin bar if you're British), a boomerang, a surprisingly tasteful beach towel in dark blue with the Australian flag on one corner, a foam stubby holder with my name on it (anathema to me as I prefer to drink my beer at room temperature, but never mind... admittedly rooms in Coffs Harbour tend to be a bit warm in summer, but I still don't want frostbite on my lips while downing a bottle of Coopers now, do I?), cake mix for Lamingtons (sponge cake with a chocolate icing which you dip into dessicated coconut - not really my cup of tea, but I know other people who will be delighted) and various other offerings. Thank you, girls! In fact, thank you everyone, and thank you Australia for having me.




















I had a lot of fun (you can tell).

Temptation...

Wrapping paper from the Royal Sydney Botanic Garden's shop - very sophisticated photographic images on a black background. Yummy.

Is there a 12-steps program for paper addicts? My name is Sara and I am completely addicted to paper: old, new, clean, raggedy-edged, ruled, plain, graph, etching paper, wrapping paper...



















I LOVE the crimson passion fruit flowers against that greeny background! And on the facing page in my portfolio a selection of blue & white papers

I thought you might like to see my portfolio case with sheets of the stuff waiting to be turned into something beautiful. It will soon be closed up while I go on my grand European tour...




















The left-hand section is a group of hand-blocked papers from Venice, and on the right a lovely black/gold/red reindeer paper that I'm going to use for some Christmas notebooks...


















Elizabeth Blackadder's flower watercolours - I love tulips and can't grow them here because it's too warm and humid

But oh dear, I've found myself plenty of paper shops on the way, including Shepherds on Southampton Row in London. This is a picture of their famous "paper wall" (I'm salivating as I type and wondering how I'm going to pack ALL OF THAT into my suitcase!). They have a 'new products blog' and an on-line shop... now that's dangerous.












I haven't located any paper merchants in Paris or Brussels on the basis that my lust for paper won't overwhelm me while I'm seeing friends and indulging in chocolate, but I'm remembering all the places I've been to before in Venice and thinking that I'll have to drop in again just to check if they have anything I need!


















Hand-made Nepalese kadi paper. The white-on-white flower block print on the bottom with gold-leaf centres I've had for ages but I'm saving it for something special!

More house stuff!

There's more news about our house over at Lookout31.blogspot.com, just so you know. Today we were able to see the size of the office/studio building for the first time as we looked at all the reinforcing that's been laid out ready for the concrete pad to be poured (hopefully tomorrow). My studio is going to be fabulous.

One thing off my list

Wanton product placement - please note, Dell! Yesterday after I'd finished everything else I finished this bag and managed to work it down to the right size, which isn't an exact science in felting.

It's always interesting to see how things turn out because the dyes, the amount of fulling you do to the fibres and the different grades of wool all contribute to how much the colours end up mixing. And to an extent you want them to mix because that indicates how well your felt will hold together! As you can see, the raspberry colours of the background fibres have worked their way through the circles of pre-felt and muted the colours slightly, but I don't mind. This bag is much nicer than the first one I made...

Plenty of room

After ruining my etching plate - and yes, it is completely cactus and so sad that I can't even bring myself to photograph the state it's in - I have found it hard to do any printmaking. However, plans are afoot to start a collograph plate tomorrow.

In the meantime I consoled myself with a second bag for my mini-laptop: I made one with Elaine on Thursday but in a vile shade of yellow! I can't think what possessed me, but I found myself at her house with a bag full of inappropriately coloured wool skeins and no way of changing my selection so had to make the best of it... hopefully there will be someone out there who LOVES pale lemon yellow with turquoise, pink and burnt orange stripes, in which case I will be delighted to let them have the bag for a small fee. Today I redeemed myself. I dutifully made 'pre-felt' (very thin felt in lovely colours, made to be cut up and incorporated into a piece of wet felt), cut it into circles large and small and then managed to use them on a bag that is predominantly a dark raspberry colour. Yum.




















Here's what it looked like when I'd just laid out the pre-felt circles. The finished bag is a bit pinker and less purple but I haven't photographed it yet as the light's gone and it's wet...

I've been thinking about the whole Etsy thing and how great it is that there's lots of room for people to set up their virtual shops and sell around the world. When I first thought of setting up shop I was concerned that my friend Jan might feel a little crowded by another book maker/seller in the same town. Amanda's been worrying about it too, as she considers setting up an Etsy shop, and I'm very sympathetic! But no need to worry, I think: we're all selling to different people. The person who likes Jan's gorgeous Gocco printed moleskines and assembled book works won't be debating whether to spend their money on one of her pieces OR one of mine. They'll like one or the other, or they won't know we're both out there anyway, or they might buy a piece of Jan's work on one occasion, and mine on another. In the meantime, hopefully more people putting up quality work raises the bar for everyone which gives us all a certain legitimacy in our efforts and promotes handmade items, which can only be a good thing.

Encore merde

Alas, my plate is thoroughly, utterly, completely ruined... and I did such a nice drawing in the soft ground! Still, after a drink at Bar Fiasco I'm slightly more sanguine about it than I might otherwise be and am considering the possibility of doing a collograph to replace it.

MERDE

Sometimes I am a complete idiot - not very often, I hasten to add, but today is one of those days.

Softground etching: lovely result, easy process, few golden rules, but one golden rule is to leave it in the acid for a short period of time because the ground is quite fragile and easily degrades. Putting it in the acid, making a phone call, dealing with several emails and then inputting my accounts probably wasn't a good idea, was it? Two hours later I realised my mistake and went back to find a very sad-looking plate. More anon after I've printed it anyway and discovered the extent of my stupidity!

House building

If you want to update yourself about the progress of our house...







... have a look here!

I've been having fun making coptic-bound sketchbooks as stock for when I open my Etsy shop at the end of October. There's something profoundly satisfying about clearing my work space, spreading out beautiful paper, making choices about sizes and threads and fastenings and then cutting everything to size. Shortly followed by sitting with the sun on my back, binding the sections and covers together while sipping coffee and listening to Beethoven string quartets on my little CD player! I feel very calm, very mellow, because the only thing I should be doing is what I am doing: making something.










I made seven sketchbooks, all filled with lovely BFK Rives 250gsm etching paper and bound with acid-free book board covered in different papers with a contrasting lining and sewn with those Danish threads I was lusting after recently. The fastenings range from buttons to beads, and I twisted matching cords from the linen threads so that the books can be tied shut.



All in all it was fun! I'm looking forward to my European trip so that I can collect some more beautiful paper, and also fill the hard-bound sketchbook I made for myself.

Set text!

Thank you everyone who has been in touch about the Artists' Book Club idea. There's always a pause while you try and work out how to kick things off, but while I've been busy with other things (root canal, sorting out our holiday, tearing my hair out about our mortgage...) I've also been reading poetry and I hope you'll like the piece of poetry I've chosen as the piece of text to inspire us for the first book.

I've gone away from my comfort zone in a sense because I don't often read poetry and I've been so busy recently I haven't read anything challenging at all. But while I was at the Sturt Winter School I picked up Ampersand Duck's beautiful letterpress book of Rosemary Dobson's poems and thought I'd like to read some of her work. Tracking anything down in Coffs Harbour has been a challenge in itself but today, amazingly, our local library had a volume of her collected poems and I chose the following poem:

Learning Absences (1986)

Being alone is also to be learnt
Long time or short time.

Walking the length of the house, shutting
The doors and the windows

No longer calling casually over one's shoulder.
Returning to find no trace

Of the other, companionable living -
Bread smell, the stove still warm,

Clothes on the line like messages,
Or messages written and left on the kitchen table:

"We need to keep watering the cumquat."
Or, "I have paid the milkman."

At night, at this season, lingering at the window
Not being certain where to find Halley's Comet,

And looking a long time at the darkening sky.

Text taken from "Rosemary Dobson, Collected Poems", part of the Angus & Robertson series 'Modern Poets'. Published 1991, ISBN 0 207 16864 4. Text copyright © Rosemary Dobson 1991.

I hope you like it: I thought it had lots going on in it, and immediately started thinking of making prints before reminding myself that I'm supposed to be thinking about making a 'book'!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the following people are guilty of wanting to be involved:
Moreidlethoughts, Ampersand Duck, Jane Aliendi, Art & Etc, Barnacle Goose Paperworks, Precious Little Birdy, Amanda Watson-Will and of course ME, which makes 8 participants, which gives an edition size of 9 books each. We'll all get a complete set and there will be once complete set left over for exhibition.

Now here comes the tricky part... deadlines! I said 'New Year' initially, but you might want to consider this: the Libris awards are on again at Artspace Mackay, as part of the Focus on Artists' Books V forum in April 2010. These are Australia's premier book arts awards and only happen every couple of years so we might want to put the set of books in for the Libris awards - only trouble is, if we want to do that we'd need to enter them by Friday 4th December 2009!

Now I don't think we'd need to send in the completed books at this point, just photos and an application form (I'm not 100% sure because the entry forms aren't yet available, but they'll be out shortly). Usually it's a case of putting together some high-res photos on CD, completing the form and paying an entry fee - the books won't be required until probably March 2010. So what do you reckon, could we be adventurous and see if we could put something in for the Libris awards? It would be a great start!

What do I need from you now? Really just confirmation that you want to take part and an email with your contact details if I don't already have them (Carol and Dinah, I don't think I have email addresses for you so at the moment the only way I can communicate is via blogging!). I've registered a blog called Book Art Object (for no particular reason - just came up with that name - if you hate it you can register a different one and we'll use that) and was going to set up all participants as members of that blog so we can all post entries and pictures. At the moment it's completely blank and could do with some love and inspiration!

Blue sky thinking...

Be still my beating heart

This is perhaps only of interest to bookbinders among you, but look at all those lovely threads! They're Danish dyed linen threads from Amazing Paper in Sydney and they are GORGEOUS. Lurking in my studio I have a pile of newly torn paper and some book board waiting to be covered in beautiful paper. Having SOLD my little STOCK OF BOOKS I need to make some more, so for the rest of the day I'm planning to cover the boards, punch the sewing stations and do Coptic bindings with my new threads. Photos in due course...

Just Fun

I keep a little list in my 'Favourites' of blogs and websites I should share with you on this blog, but I rarely get around to mentioning them which is a bit hopeless. So here are some book/bookbinding related sites I've been looking at recently:

Handbound Weekly is a blog that pulls together all sorts of makers of books and book-y things in the Etsy on-line community. It's a great place to browse and see what other book binders are selling, and it's the work of Cindy Leaders, who has her own blog here.

Paperiarre is a lovely blog about handmade books and things from Kaija in Finland. I'm at once of admiring of her evident style and covetous of her beautiful books! I hope she won't mind me saying that she's put ideas into my head about embedding objects in book covers or, to be more precise, she's shown me how it can be done. She also has an Etsy shop here.

And lastly for this evening, I was blown away by the sheer, mad, single-mindedness of Watarou Itou and his paper Castle on the Ocean... Crazy and beautiful, it apparently took FOUR YEARS to make. I'll never complain about my slow rate of output again!

PS., for all you Australian book artists out there, you may not be aware that Focus on Artists Books V has been announced by Artspace Mackay, for April 2010. There is a forum, workshops and an exhibition and you can find details on the Artspace Mackay website together with information about the Libris awards. I don't know why there hasn't been a bigger effort to publicise the event? It's a big thing in the Australian artists book world and yet I found out about it through a comment on Artist Books 3.0 and even then I had to search the internet to find out the information.

Fun and games on Blogger

In case you're wondering, I took the photo lying on my back at the end of one of my Pilates classes, looking up at the trees. It's the sort of thing you do when you're feeling well-stretched.














Anyway, I've been having fun and games with Blogger this weekend. Looking through the various threads on the Help pages I can see that other people are having the same problems: adding a blog to your "Blogs I'm Following" tabs only for the whole lot to disappear and for you to fall into a malaise because you can't remember all the URLs for them... then they reappear, magically, a bit later on. And discovering that you have a new fan, only to find that when you click on your 'Followers' widget you can't find any fans at all and feel very lonely all of a sudden. This blogging lark isn't for the faint-hearted, I can tell you. Thank you, mystery 9th follower of this blog: I'd love to know who you are but I can't see you so I shall send you anonymous good wishes!

Update - book artists' book club

Thank you for the favourable comments! It seems the idea is good, so I'm going to propose the following and ask you to tweak it if you want to, and get back to me.

How about...

~ we start off now-ish and aim to have completed our books by Christmas, revealing all to our adoring public at New Year? That gives us slightly less than 6 months

~ we need to find something to kick things off and inspire us. Suggestions please! I throw into the ring a novel, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg, ISBN:1860461670 and a poem, A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman (and yes, this is the poem that inspired my Gossamer Bridge book) but I'm very happy to use something else

~ my thought was to make an edition of our books (nothing like a challenge!) so that when we're finished we can each have one of everybody's books and there would be at least one complete set left over to exhibit. I got 5 positive responses from this blog plus a couple on Twitter plus me = 8 people interested, so perhaps 9 copies to make if everyone takes part

~ question: is it easier to have a team blog (i.e. we can all post to the same blog about the project) or a Ning community...? Tell me what you think. By the way, the name 'bookartsclub.blogspot.com' is currently available for a Blogger team blog

~ so at the moment what we need to do is agree a source book, a timescale and how we're going to communicate what we're doing with each other. By the way, I don't have email for everyone who's expressed an interest so it would be good if you could email me with your contact details if you want to take part

The Berrima Shopping Experience

There had to be a 'downside' to being at Sturt Winter School and that was its proximity to several delightful places specially designed to separate me from my money! One such was the wonderfully eccentric shop Peppergreen in Berrima. Naturally I had to go twice.

On the first visit I managed to walk away with only a hand-made lace doily to add to my collection. On the second visit my wallet fared rather worse and I bought 3 exquisite handworked bags and a ball of French linen twine in red, white and blue. Very patriotic.





















'Bag' is too mundane a term to describe these items: they're the sort of handmade fold-over cotton, silk or linen bags that girls of a previous generation made to keep their special garments in, such as delicate underwear or silk stockings. For some reason there was an entire barrow full on sale and I picked up these for less than $30!






















Don't be under the impression, however, that Peppergreen is cheap. No. However, things would have been considerably more expensive if the shop assistant had been allowed to get away with adding $12.50, $12.50, $10 and $7.50 up on her CALCULATOR and somehow arriving at the grand total of $157 dollars! She didn't take kindly to me pointing out her error and consequently was extremely snooty with me as I paid.





















What I really mean, though, is that there are a lot of gorgeous items in the shop with gorgeous prices: I coveted some shiny glazed blackbird pie funnels but they were $65 each, while the equally enchanting white elephant pie funnels were over $100...

Having said all that, you can't fault the selection available and if I had more money I'd have been in purchasing heaven. Brass 1940's doorhandle sets, Victorian jelly and chocolate moulds, hand-stitched quilts and linens from decades ago and every variety of silver or bone-handled cutlery you could imagine. Large boxes full of assorted buttons or mother-of-pearl buttons or whole cards of buttons, drawers full of antique haberdashery, shelves of books, labelled bags of patterns for everything from tatting (did I mention I also bought Italian, German and Spanish tatting patterns and a 1940's red tatting shuttle...? Oops!) to model train making, rolls of canvas for making espadrilles and quantities of gold thread for bullion-work. Boxes of old dolls' clothes (I looked but sadly nothing I liked), a hat stand full of 1930s and 1940s hats, jewellry, furs, gloves, combs, paper patterns... I can see why the shop is a magnet for stylists and set dressers.





















Just across the road from Peppergreens is the ostensible reason for our two trips into Berrima: the shop The Art of Bookbinding. Unfortunately we hadn't realised it was open Wednesday to Sunday so when we first turned up, on Tuesday, it was closed. When we came back we cleaned up on rolls of bookcloth, Japanese hand-printed endpapers, bone folders, book binders awls and headbands - or at least, I did! The bone folder and one of the awls are for a friend, but even so I managed to spend a fair amount of money (sigh). The owners, Hugo and Henni van Willigen, have a formidable reputation but they were very welcoming and offered telephone support if we run into technical troubles while binding something, which was nice. I was in awe of their bookbinding equipment, seen in the studio at the back of their shop, but then they are serious bookbinders, working with leather and gold tooling and lots of things about which I know nothing.

So there you have it: Berrima, shopping Mecca in the southern highlands, and blessed with the Gumnut bakery next door too which, in case you were wondering how I know, does the most magnificent vanilla slice and I bought one on each visit to enliven my evenings at Sturt and repel the cold!

Le Grand Fromage

How good does that look? YUM! Brie made by my dearest hubby, whom I sent off on a cheesemaking course for his birthday in April.

B-b-b-beautiful b-b-books a-and b-b-b-oxes... brrr

I've gone soft. Almost three years of living on the mid-north coast of New South Wales and now I wibble if the temperature dips below 18 degrees centigrade, so spending the last 10 days driving around southern and western New South Wales in temperatures that reached a high of about 9 degrees C on a good day felt rather b-b-bloody c-c-cold. I've spent most of this afternoon resetting my internal thermometer by sitting in a nice hot bath with a cup of nice hot tea and feel warmer, and I've put all my thermal clothing in the wash!

We've all had a good time in our different ways: darling daughter saw her paternal grandparents, several uncles and aunts and cousins, and went to stay with Daddy's youngest brother for a couple of days on a sheep station near Goulburn. Then some other (very obliging) friends picked her up and she stayed with them at Shoalhaven Heads for another couple of days until I scooped her and her father up yesterday morning and we drove back up to Coffs Harbour. Dearest husband had spent the week bearing up with noble fortitude under the heavy burden of five nights in the Sydney Intercontinental Hotel, although I should add that he worked VERY HARD and the fact that a couple of his delightful clients might be about to stump up some actual cash makes everything bearable.

Meanwhile I stayed at Frensham School in the southern highlands town of Mittagong, at the Sturt Winter School, partaking of Caren Florance's course Beautiful Books and Boxes.



I was doodling with scissors

I always think it's hard, as a tutor, planning courses. Unless you grill your students in advance you have no idea of their skills, interests or experience or whether spending a week in a room with them is going to be tantamount to torture! And the same goes for the students too, I daresay. Will your tutor be a patronising pain-in-the-proverbial or someone who will actually teach you something you didn't previously know...? I'm pleased to say, since Caren was the drawcard for me attending the course, that she's fun, funny, interesting and taught me a lot. Phew! Relief all round I think, for it was a good bunch of people in our group and although our skill levels and experience varied our enthusiasm and energy made it a good course and we all got on well (which helps).






A photopolymer print used as a cover with Japanese stab binding



Clamshell box with coptic bound book inside





Coptic bound book












Examples of stab bindings

Stab binding I'd done many times before, but it's no hardship doing it again. I bound a box full of little notebooks with hand-marbled paper from Venice and put an inner front page of music before the blank paper. I gave them all to the daughters of our friends who picked up Darling Daughter, as a small gift.





Caterpillar binding

Once I'd made the clamshell box I ran out of ideas for an hour until it occurred to me that Caren could baby-sit me through the process of doing a caterpillar binding. I'd seen pictures and loved it, and I have instructions in Keith Smith's excellent-but-intimidating book on open-spine bindings. Caren was able to point me at simpler instructions on the Canberra Craft Bookbinder's Guild website. and between the two sources I was able to understand how to start the caterpillars and use them to bind in the pages of the book. Hooray! I wouldn't have ventured to try it were it not for the course, and having now made two books I hope I've mastered the method and will use it some more...



Final exhibition

Here are pictures of what some of the other participants made during the week:

Don't forget to tell me what you think...

Let me know what you think about the Book Club for artists' book makers, mentioned two posts down (here). Thanks!

Hatmaking with dinner plates

Last week I made two hats for darling daughter. The first was a lovely little purple Fedora which I stupidly spun (NOT rinsed!) using the spin cycle on my washing machine - which shrank it beautifully (sob). So I had to make number two and remember to let it dry unaided, which took several days.

This week I thought I deserved a hat for myself and so my lesson with Eileen on Wednesday was all about using a stack of plates to make a hat!



First, make the usual 'bucket' shape as the base. Then tie three or four plates of different sizes into the 'bucket' and work them with soap and water!



The felt will shrink around the plates and take on their shape



Twist the top around





















Dry the hat... et voila!





















It's surprisingly difficult taking photos of yourself with something on your head - my arms aren't long enough!


This is daughter's hat, version 2, complete with flower garland as a hat band

Book Club - an idea

A call to book artists!

How does this work for an idea? I really enjoying bouncing my ideas off other people, I also enjoy bringing people together to do things and I really enjoy books: as objects, as art works, as stimulation. And I really miss my old book club in Bristol, UK.

If you're an artist working in artists' books, how would you like to join a book club with a difference? Members would take turns chosing a piece of writing (book/poem/play/whatever) that the group would use as a source of ideas for producing an artists' book, say every quarter or every six months. The internet can provide the connection between members, and we could write up/photograph/document our work through something like a joint blog or a Ning on-line group. Resulting artists' books would probably be radically different from each other but would have a common link through the writing that inspired them, and could potentially be exhibited as a group.








I'd be aiming to make things easy (no point in saddling ourselves with something that becomes a chore...). Easy to administer, easy to be a part of, and no sense of 'having to do something you don't want to do'. You could join and not do every book but pick the ones which take your fancy.

So tell me, WHAT DO YOU THINK? Answers and any questions would be very welcome, and if you think of anyone else who works in artists' books and might like to join it would be great if you could pass on this blog post and perhaps they'd like to get in touch.