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journal |
August 2004 |
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8-6-04 The Berea Arts Council Paper from Plants workshop that I taught August 2-4 was delight! The class was composed of a diverse group of incredibly creative people, and we had a ball. . 8-10-04 Spent the day sorting through pulps left from the workshop and pulling cards from some of them. I cut squares and rectangles from some scrap papers and laid them on the wet sheets before putting them in the press so they would actually be embedded in the card. I did the same with some of the envelopes. It's strange...before I began papermaking, I never sent cards other than a few sympathy cards. Now, I can't keep them around. Sometimes I send them just for the pleasure of sharing a new design. .8-12-04 Today I pulled swatches for a swap I'm involved in (sorry, no pictures). I also fooled around with pulling feathers from some of the left over cooked daylily leaves. I only processed them in the blender for a few seconds, just barely breaking them down and leaving some leaves almost whole. It ended up working well. Because the plant material was pretty much whole and because of the variation in the leave's colors, then feathers took on a striped appearance, much like hawk's wing and tail feathers. I exchanged dried these in a press, but took them out while there was still some moisture inside the feather and left them sitting on the desk. I did this intentionally, hoping they would curl slightly. They did so nicely and look less like paper and more like feathers as a result. 8-13-04 It's mid August. Mid August in Kentucky is hot and humid...usually. Today it is too cold to pull paper. Never even got up to 70 and I've been running around in a sweatshirt. This is ridiculous! 8-16-04 Finally it has warmed up enough in the afternoons to fool around with paper stuff. (Here in Kentucky we're looking at the coolest August since the early 1900's. Whoof! This weather does not agree with my bones!) I put some hickory bast on to cook for a special project, a piece for the state Guild's fall exhibit. What I have in mind is a basket with two compartments. Whether this will work out or not will depend on how negotiations go with the basket. Baskets have a mind of their own, no matter whether they're woven or formed. I may have one thing in mind, but the basket may have quite another. Dictating and demanding that the basket take the form I want simply doesn't work. So, we have conversations. "I want you to....." "Nope, forget it. I won't do that." "Well, will you instead...." "Maybe...maybe not." "Please....?" In the end, the basket becomes a collaboration between the two of us...partly my ideas, mainly the basket's. Beat the hickory for four hours late this afternoon, but I ran out of daylight and just left it in the tub. 8-17-04 I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this basket, at least, the way I'm going about it. I started with a double loop of heavy honeysuckle secured by weavings of the finer vines. What I had in mind was a central wall dividing the basket making two totally independent, yet co-joined baskets. All went well creating the divider, but after that section dried and I tried to figure out how to build the rest of the basket, I realized I had major problems. Actually, what I had was a structural nightmare, mainly because I wanted that central dividing section to float about an inch or so above the bottom of the baskets. Fine, but how the heck do you float something until you can construct the bottoms?. I finally drug out the sewing frame that I use for bookbinding and clothespinned the central section to it so that the basket was secured about an inch above the base. Don't laugh. It worked, at least long enough for me to get one base formed. (The coffee cup isn't an accidental inclusion in the picture. I need a weight to hold the base in the exact position, and given that there's always a coffee cup lying about in the workroom, that was the first thing that I grabbed.) I have to wait for each section to dry before I do anything else, so it was add something, wait, add something else and wait. Putting it out in the sun helped. Initially, I thought I would start the basket, get the base on, then put a plastic bag filled with something inside of each section and form the remainder of the basket over that, but the basket offered another suggestion. "Why not freeform me without anything inside? Why not let the drapes and folds fall where they may?" Baskets have been known to mislead, even lie to get their way. I'm going to sleep on this. 8-18-04 I decided to attempt the basket without any inside support, mainly because I'm curious about 1) how the process will differ from doing it over a form and 2) how the form of the finished basket will differ. If it isn't developing the way I want, it should be possible to alter the shape somewhat as it dries by hand molding...I think. I had a couple of interruptions today and was only able to get the other bottom on it and do a little around the top today. The basket has taken a slight drunken lurch to one side, but that should be correctable by dampening the area just above the base, weighting the base and pulling the basket to one side and allowing it to dry that way. Should be no problem, she says with unwarranted confidence. **The College called this morning to say a crew was cleaning out the flowerbed on the square in front of Boone Tavern and volunteered any of the plants I wanted to have for papermaking. Stopped long enough to run up there and look through what they were chopping off and digging up. Given that I already had a project going on, there really wasn't anything that I was interested in hauling home and drying The other interruption was a little more time consuming. Tourism called and said the woman who is translating A Papermaker's Season into Japanese would like to have some handmade paper on which to write the introduction. I'm assuming she is planning on doing it with a calligrapher's brush, and I had no paper around here that hadn't been sized. I did have some mulberry and butterflyweed pulps, so I mixed those and pulled several thin 8.5"x11" sheets. Fortunately, the pulps are beautiful together. The mulberry is finer and forms a lovely base for the wisps of butterflyweed that swirl through it. I'm no sumi-e artist, but I do have a brush set, stone and ink stick, so I tried the paper to make sure it would work with that type of calligraphy. I'll likely pull a few, slightly heavier sheets of the mixed pulps tomorrow just to make sure I have the thickness she needs. 8-20-04 I have five flowerbeds, three of which are rather large, and all but one require renovation before next spring. I really thought I had the plantings worked out so that no more than two would need this in any given year, but Mother Nature had other ideas. So much for my careful scheduling. What does any of this have to do with papermaking? Nothing...except digging up and dividing plants has kept me away from it. **I did manage to catch some time today to fill in a little more on the basket. One side is now reduced to two holes. (That shot, for some reason, reminds me ever so much of a pair of dirty, kids' training pants.) The other side is going to be a problem. The bottom is offset to the right of the opening. If I fill in the opening in the way that seems most logical, the basket will appear to be ill formed and top heavy when viewed from that side. If a bulge is created to eliminate that appearance, it may look ill formed from another direction. The whole thing is a structural nightmare. I'm going with the second option, and hope for the best. 8-21-04 The larger, more symmetrical side of the basket is filled, as is the left side of the other. Now, I'm left with creating a bulge to offset this lopsided appearance. (FWIW, I've taken no care with the tint in any of these jpgs. When the basket is finished, I'll do a better job.) 8-22-04 Yesterday I stopped by the Artisan Center to visit with Jim Sams, a woodcarver from London, Kentucky. I first met Jim maybe 25 years ago. He was a good woodcarver then. He is incredible now. His attention to detail sets his work miles apart from anyone else I know. I've uploaded two pictures of his work. There are also compressed high resolution shots of those same pieces. Please believe me, these are worth the short wait. The first is a native Kentucky plant, trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) (click here for high resolution - 153 KB). Yes, that is entirely wood, honest. The second shot is a tiger swallowtail resting on the leaf of a crabapple (click here for high resolution - 74 KB). Incredible work by a really neat fellow. 8-23-04 Back to the basket.... There is no way to take a decent picture of this thing. No one angle or image captures it, and this would really bother me if I were shooting slides of the basket for jurying or exhibition purposes, but I'm not. Here are three shots - the display front, back and from the top. It's basically finished, though I intend to go back over the entire outside with another layer of paper to smooth out the finish, which is too rough in some places to suit me. That next layer will smooth the minor roughness, yet leave the more significant irregularities alone. Even after that, though, I have a feeling the basket will lack something. It just doesn't feel "finished." I don't normally like feathers as enhancements, but this time? I dunno. We'll see....... I've learned several things from constructing the basket in the manner that I did. The first, and most important, is that I'm never doing it this way again. Nope, no way. However, I did learn other things that may prove useful. If this basket had been made over a form and the form removed, I know now that it would still have been possible to alter the basket's shape. I know that if I design two separate bottom pieces, the drying paper will shrink and tug until those two bottoms are not on a level. I learned also that it's necessary to weight both bottoms every time that shrinkage might even think about occurring. Learned several other things, too, but I'm too ashamed that I made the mistakes in the first place to share their solutions. Can you tell I'm not overly thrilled with this particular basket? That's is one of the chances you take in creating anything. Sometimes things work beautifully, sometimes they don't. I promised to share both warts and beauty marks when I started this journal. This basket falls somewhere between the two. 8-27-04 The basket surface smoothed out nicely after the last layer of paper, and I'm pleased with that part, but there was something missing. As I said before, it just didn't seem finished. In my own work, I'm not fond of embellishments, things simply added to or tacked onto a finished piece. I prefer that everything be a part of the work itself, but in this case, I did add an embellishment, and doing that achieved the desired effect. I had the paper feathers made from daylily leaves. Two of them added just the right touch to flesh out a finished basket. I'm far happier with it than I was. **Not wanting to tackle another piece without using an inner form (I'm a quick study), I played around with this one that was formed over a piece of pottery done by Wyman Rice, an excellent clay artist from Lexington and a friend for 20 years or so. This flattened urn shape is one of his signature pieces, and I acknowledge that in the title -- "Wyman in Paper." (Some time ago he did a carapace that I truly wish I had purchased. The piece was somewhat disturbing, but very impressive.) Because of the form's shape, the piece had to be created in halves, each dried, then the two halves joined. (I became so involved in the process that I forgot to take pictures along the way.) To make the first half, I cut a bottom from 1/4" plywood, then formed the paper over the front of the urn and the plywood bottom. After that was dry, I removed it and formed the back side of the piece and covering the bottom of the urn, this time without the plywood bottom. After this was dry, I removed it. The covering on the bottom of the second half then fit nicely over the plywood that was attached to the first half and helped to secure the two halves while I joined them along the seams. .The base paper for the piece is hickory and there are two to three coats of that. There is a rolled edging of hickory around the rim that was covered with yet more hickory. Over the lower 3/4 of the piece I used Boston fern "paper." Why is that in quotes? Because the sheets are so fibrous, I really hesitate to call them paper. Still, they do have a solid base of fine fibers carrying the heavier ones. Dunno. Whether paper or non-paper, it is a lovely, deep chocolate with a delicious shine. The yarns are natural dyed, hand spun cotton. They are not sewn through the piece. Instead, the yarn strip is formed apart from the piece, then attached. To create this, I made a warp of the yarns, then wove torn pieces of the Boston fern through it, leaving about a half inch of the paper outside the yarn. Then this strip was attached to the form so that it actually becomes an integral part of the piece. I thought I would have to patch over the end pieces to make them melt into the piece, but it wasn't necessary. There were absolutely no visible attachment seams when I added it, something that, frankly, surprised me. |
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