Wot I've been up to recently

I've been a bit quiet for all sorts of reasons. Technically we've had a bit of a laptop malfunction - it can happen to anyone, you know! - and while I now have internet access again I don't yet have email on my laptop and have been borrowing dearest husband's every now and again to catch up. So if I've been a bit tardy with replying to you, now you know why! Normal service will, I'm sure, be resumed soon...
















We've just enjoyed two and a half weeks of Easter/Autumn school holidays which coincided with dearest husband's birthday so we sneaked a surprise birthday celebration in on Easter Sunday under the guise of egg hunts and lunch - and it's darned hard to sneak anything up on him so I feel justifiably proud of myself! To save money I made the eggs, melting down several bars of chocolate that were lurking in my cupboard, thereby saving my waistline from excess! This is the result: the eggs were too large to hide so instead I hid little drawings of the patterns on the eggs, and the children hunted for the drawings and were able to identify "their" egg in the basket at the end. I also made the adults play for a change: they had to hunt for riddles that were clues, taking them from one place to another before they finally found their eggs in an egg carton on top of the microwave! The catch for them was that they got hand-marbled, blown chicken's eggs with no chocolate in sight, but since we served lunch immediately afterwards no-one complained. And the food was delicious, too... all our guests brought a plate of food to share so we had roast lamb, lemon-roasted potatoes, home-grown roast vegetables, a herby quinoa salad, fresh bread rolls, quiches and cheeses and dips and lots of other things, finishing off with fruit and I made a simnel cake.


















Now that the party's over I've got back down to some serious work and have been putting many hours in at my studio, working towards the show. Nothing finished to show you yet, but it's coming along! I've been having fun with all sorts of things including my Christmas present which was a Dremel tool...














And finally, last but certainly not least, I can tell you that we were paid by that nameless Australian bank! They managed to keep us waiting again, phoning dearest husband the week before Easter and assuring him that the money would be in our account before the bank holidays but of course it wasn't. We emailed them on the 27th - his birthday - to follow it up and it finally arrived and was visible via internet banking at about 5pm, much to our relief. I was so relieved, in fact, after six months of nothing in my wallet and fielding dozens of phone calls about unpaid bills, that I was ill and had to go to bed... clearly I've been more stressed about things than I thought! But anyway, it was a great birthday present for M, and perhaps that was fitting timing. We're not out of the woods yet (I stand no chance whatsoever of clearing our credit card bill or fully paying our builder, poor man) but we're closer than we were and at least I know we can pay the mortgage until October when the next instalment arrives. Meanwhile I've taken all my paperwork in to TAFE so perhaps I shall earn some money soon, if I don't have a nervous breakdown about the exhibition first!

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.

Some felt, a post and a deadline

I was talking about prevarication in my other blog, Mostly Up, in relation to the fact that I've spent the day doing anything other than the things I should be doing i.e. reading financial reports, doing the accounts and preparing cash-flow forecasts. Well, just reading that little list can you blame me? I can proudly say, though, that by this hour (10pm) I have at least read all the financial reports, made copious notes, prepared myself for tomorrow's Board meeting at school, iced the cakes I made earlier, put aside a box full for the aforesaid Board meeting (if I have to sit in a room for over 4 hours debating school policy I need a good mug of coffee and some cake), had some 'family time' and put our darling daughter with her horrible, horrible cold to bed. So now I'm entitled to take photos of rusty metal poles and the finished slippers.



Slippers with rosettes, plus an almost-finished pencil case












I've included the photos of the post to remind myself that in the back of my mind I actually do have various ideas ticking over for printmaking. My dearest husband was forced to intervene in my felt fetish the other day, gently asking if I have any 'art' going on in my head..? It clearly isn't evident in all the fun I'm having with fibres!






















Luckily for me the answer was 'yes', in a long-winded sort of fashion. I did feel rather knocked back by the CPM show (and golly I'd better remember tomorrow to organise a courier to pick up my entry because I'm damned sure it hasn't sold and the show ends on Saturday) when I got home... It's been good and healthy to have a few weeks to reflect on things but he's right, I actually do need to get on with some work. Although I've scrubbed out a couple of shows I was thinking of entering I do want to put a new artists' book into the Southern Cross Acquisitive Artists' Book Awards this year and the deadline is creeping quietly towards me.






















The post is a bit of a decoy because it has nothing to do with any printmaking that will end up as part of an artists' book for the SCU show, but it was a reminder to me this afternoon of how much I enjoy texture and how I tend to see things in the real world in a fairly abstract way.