PSBA Third Annual Exhibition

I have been super busy, spending long hours at work lately, but I am really looking forward to tomorrow night, which is opening night for our Puget Sound Book Artists Third Annual Members' Exhibition. When I dropped my own book off on Tuesday I caught glimpses of other pieces that will be in the show, and now I can hardly wait to see what else will be there. I am always both humbled and excited that I am in the company of such amazing talent.

If you are in the Puget Sound area, this show runs through July 31, so you have all summer to find time to see it. The University of Puget Sound campus is lovely in summer, and the Collins Memorial Library is easy to find on campus. Walk in the main doors, head through the lobby, and you will run right in to the exhibit. And if you want a real treat, come on the evening of June 20. That night, from 5-8 PM, the cases housing the artwork will be opened up, and the artists will have the opportunity to show off their books (turning the pages for you!) and to talk briefly about their work. That is always my very favorite part of the exhibition, and you can be sure I will be there. There are so many things you can learn about each piece that you just don't discover by looking at it sitting in a glass case. Books, after all, are really meant to be held. Conversation with the Artists night is the next best thing to holding the books yourself.

In other news, I recently had the opportunity to stay in London for a couple of weeks. Do I have pictures? Oh yes, of course I do. And I will be sharing some of them very soon. Stay tuned...

Another Maze Fold Book

Many years ago, I was fortunate to have the chance to take week-long workshop with one of my all time favorite fiber artists, Jan Beaney. One of her design exercises was to begin a photo file of textures-- close-ups of wood, rock, paint, rust-- anything showing interesting texture. That habit has stuck with me and I now have a large file of photos, and an even larger digital file of photos to sort through when I am looking for inspiration. What I noticed, while looking through my digital file a few months ago, was that I seem to compulsively photograph every bridge I encounter.

So I have started a new exploration of bridges in book form, using maze-fold format. Here are the first experiments:

And Now for the Good News

It has been a challenging few months, and there have been some pretty terrible moments, but truly, it isn't all bad. So now for the Good Things. In February my son Sam and his lovely BFF Jeanette announced their engagement. How lucky am I to have sons who have chosen such fantastic partners? It's a good match, we are all very happy, and looking forward to a wedding later in the year.

In March, I got news that TWO--yes, TWO-- of my books had been chosen for inclusion in 500 Handmade Books, Vol 2, to be published by Lark Books in early September. Oh you better believe I did a little dance around the house when I got that news.

Our Puget Sound Book Arts group once again helped with the Tacoma Wayzgoose celebration last weekend. Wayzgoose is always a lot of fun, and the highlight of the event, as always, is the steamroller printing. It was interesting to see that some printmakers did some hand coloring of their prints this year, just to mix it up a little.

All the prints are fantastic, but this year my favorite was most definitely the cat. Seriously, who hasn't felt like that at least once?

I'm Still Here. Honest.

 Time flies when Stuff Happens. I am sure it flies no matter what, but when it seems to be flying straight into your face... well, sometimes you place updating blogs waaay down on the list. Or at least I do.

So. This is my life since January. Well really let us back up to October/November, because that really is where things went south. First, October, when a friend became gravely ill half a world away. Steve, husband of my dear friend Paula,  left us on November first, in Bursa turkey. I will miss that guy forever. He was a remarkable person. He's the one on the left, by the way.

Then, there is of course The Job. The job is mostly fun, mostly interesting, extremely demanding, and a long commute away. I have graduated (or is it succumbed???) to TWO monitors in order to keep all information straight. Still, in this crazy digital age, there are days when, despite fancy computers and two monitors, I am literally awash in fiddly little receipts that want to fly everywhere when someone opens the door. That isn't the fun part. But ten hour days and one hour commutes make me tired, and blogging suffers.

In the middle of January we had a little interlude to help my son Joe and his wife Anna move across the state to Spokane. We were not happy to see them move so far away, but excited for Anna, who is now producing the 11 PM news for KLXY TV, the ABC affiliate in Spokane. It was an easy move for Joe, since his company has a branch office in that very same town. It was a cold, snowy move, but a nice little break. I call this photo Moving Van Jenga. So many items were crammed into the truck that we really did not know what to remove first. I was sure it was all going to fall out the minute Joe's friend touched that ice chest. That's why I'm standing so far away.


Around the end of January it came to our attention that Mr. B's dad was not doing so well, losing weight, needing a little help, so we began the process to move him from his home in southern Arizona up to our town in the Pacific Northwest where he could be closer to family. Uprooting an elderly parent is a big difficult step, but we were really looking forward to having him near us because he was such a great guy. Sadly, he died unexpectedly on March 20, just a few weeks before he was to join us up here. I will miss that guy forever too. I am so glad he was in my life for a while. But dealing with a parent's estate takes time too, especially when travel is involved, and during all that I was busy with my own dad's heart surgery here at home, plus The Job, and the dog, and the parrot, and the geriatric cat (who also sadly left us a few weeks ago) and Life In General. So that is my story of the not-so-great side of 2013 so far. But there IS more story, and it is happier. I will leave it for the next post, which, I promise, follows hard on the heels of this one.

The Finished Set

OK, here is the set for The Children's Hour, completed. Thanks, Judy, for the photo.

The Children's Hour

I started the new year with a little set-painting project-- The Children's Hour, designed by my good friend Judy Cullen. The theatre is a modified black box style, this time with the audience sitting on all four sides of the set, which is a multi-level platform. My job was to make that plywood platform look like an oak and walnut wood floor. The faux wood grain starts with a solid flat color painted on. It could be any number of yellowish-to-tan shades (or in the case of mahogany, an outlandish salmon pink). This time we used a pale warm yellow. Next step is figuring out where the "boards" are going to be, and drawing them with a sharpie.

Next step was the oak graining glaze. I mix the correct color from pigment, faux glaze (which has no color) and some water. Then I paint it on a "board" and pull part of the paint off using a graining comb or rocker grainer, which leaves grain lines and lets some of the undercoat show through. The goal with painting for theatre is not to be perfectly accurate with wood grain, but to "suggest" accurately enough that the audience members fill in the rest from their memory of what real wood looks like. I have learned over the years how to be pretty successful with that.

It takes time to do this, but it is one of those jobs that you can become completely absorbed in. Thursday was a very Be Here Now day.

The third paint step is another glaze- a little more transparent this time, that tones the other two paint colors and makes the wood look more real. It is an amber glaze for the oak and a darker brown that has a bit of purple in it for the walnut. After that is dry, this theatre puts a bit of glossy sealer on the paint job to protect it from actors' shoes and enhance the colors and grain lines. There was also a bit of non-wood grain painting to do on two freestanding door frames.

And here is a shot of the set with furniture on it, and most of the trim pieces applied to the platforms. That trim really finishes the platform off nicely. The last photo was taken at a rehearsal last week by the set designer Judy Cullen. If I get a chance, I will photograph the set myself after the show opens tomorrow night.

Finished. Whew.

I like my new job. I really do. But the hours are long, and the commute is horrible. Old job: round trip commute of 2 miles or less. New job: round trip commute of 76.8 miles. On the freeway. Three, sometimes four days a week. That is two hours per day commuting on a GOOD day, nearly 4 hours commute on a terrible day. This makes studio work a struggle sometimes, but I am determined to move into a more rigid schedule of studio time because there are ideas in my head that really need to get out. Ok, end of pathetic little whine.

Today I turned down work and even declined doing a good deed so that I could spend a day in the studio, and here is the result. My latest book finally finished! These shots are just quick snaps because I was too excited to drag out the light cube and do a formal portrait.

The pages are made from some theatrical scrim that I washed all the sizing out of- so it is very gauzy and floppy. Because of this, I wrapped each of the three signatures in a lace paper I had purchased last year. I tea-stained the white lace paper to make it closer in color to the scrim. I also hemmed the lace paper and put a picot bead edging on it to give the book a bit more weight.  I wish I could tell you what the cover paper is, but I am not sure. I know it is handmade, and I think it is from Nepal. It is lovely, but a bit fragile, so I coated it with acrylic wax and laminated a piece of thin kimono lining silk to the inside to strengthen it. That paper absorbed the acrylic wax nicely and it worked well as a glue to laminate the silk. The spine has an extra piece on the outside connected only by the binding stitches. It is some handmade paper with a high cotton content that I also tea-stained. And I sewed a little guinea hen feather to add to the flyaway feel.

I have to thank Mary Ann Moss for the binding stitch. I have been mulling over her latest class offering, and when I was reading the class blurb, the binding stitch she will be teaching caught my attention. Hadn't I seen it somewhere? Hadn't I shoved a bookmark in a page at some point? Yes I had, and that stitch was going to be perfect for this book. Of course I changed it up a bit. If you want to learn this stitch, I can't think of a better way than to treat yourself to Mary Ann's class. Then come back here and you'll be able to figure out what I did.(click on photo for larger view)

Sewing signatures made of scrim is quite fiddly, and I do not recommend it for beginners, although once you understand the sewing pattern, this binding stitch is very satisfying. I did make a little practice book using the stitch before I started the larger amended version, but I also can't recommend doing what I did. Because as you can see, mine was not so much little as it was tiny.

 

Details: signatures are sumi rice paper, cover is cave paper that has been coated with acrylic wax varnish. Binding thread is Gutermann silk sewing thread.